Justin Amash, the libertarian Republican from Michigan, had established the group as a loosely organized luncheon for a couple of his fellow Ron Paul acolytes. They gathered every few months, debating the Fourth Amendment while munching on deli platters and sipping cans of Cherry Coke. The caucus was an afterthought on Capitol Hill. Yet, in early 2014, as the insurgents wandered in the party’s wilderness, seeking a territory of their own, Amash allowed his friends (Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, Raúl Labrador, Mick Mulvaney, and Thomas Massie, among others) to adopt his House Liberty Caucus as their home base.
The group began meeting every other week. Two dozen members arrived in secret, swearing to safeguard the discussions held within. There were no leaks, no spies working for Boehner or Cantor. After three years spent battling their leadership within the House majority, worrying all the while about sabotage and betrayal, House conservatives finally had a safe haven.
It was a breakthrough for the rebels, and an inflection point for the party. After four decades as the tip of the conservative movement’s spear, the Republican Study Committee was losing relevance, its ideological intensity mitigated by its swelling membership. With three out of every four House Republicans now belonging to the RSC, many of them viewing the $5,000 membership dues as an investment in preempting a primary challenge from the right, the organization could not possibly play the intraparty hardball its founders had envisioned.
“The RSC today covers a fairly broad philosophical swath of the party. It’s no longer just the hard-core right-wingers,” Mulvaney said upon joining the House Liberty Caucus.
“When working with like-minded people,” Amash added, “you need something a little more nimble that doesn’t dilute its positions because of the size of the group.”
Nimbler, smaller, and more secretive, the breakaway faction of right-wingers got busy mapping out its strategy for 2014. Their first target was institutional apathy. Congress has a rich tradition of doing as little as possible in even-numbered years, and the rebels hoped to change that. They wanted the party to pursue major legislation—on taxation, welfare, privacy, and health care, for starters—instead of simply running out the clock until Election Day.
Boehner and McConnell had different ideas. The president’s approval ratings were middling. His signature law was proving increasingly unpopular. Republicans were poised to expand their House majority and win back the Senate—as long as they didn’t overplay their hand. “If your opponent is committing suicide,” Boehner warned his troops, “Why shoot him?”
Yet again, in the spring of 2014, a fundamental schism was being laid bare—this one about power and its inherent purposes. The conservatives insisted that the election should be waged around ideas, even if those ideas might cost the party votes; the leadership argued that the party’s best chance for implementing those ideas was by winning elections first. The conservatives thought the leadership cowardly; the leadership thought the conservatives reckless.
By the time Boehner visited Ailes in New York City, the rebels’ interest in procedural changes was taking a backseat to their contempt for the party’s establishment. They could not begin to fix Congress without replacing its most powerful figure. Once again, they started scheming to oust Boehner. This time it would be different: By organizing early in the year, they told themselves, they would lock down the votes needed to prevent Boehner from winning another term as Speaker. They would tell him as much in private after the November elections, preventing an ugly scene from unfolding on the House floor in January 2015.
Little did they know, Boehner was already plotting his exit strategy.
A COMMON EXPLANATION FOR THE TEA PARTY’S ELECTORAL SUCCESSES of 2010 and 2012 was that the Republican establishment had overreached. By endorsing the likes of Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio and David Dewhurst over Ted Cruz, this thinking went, GOP insiders had unwittingly aided the opposition by stoking antagonism toward the paternalistic party elite.
This was not exactly wrong: Amid a groundswell of resentment toward Washington, the self-important endorsements from politicians, party leaders, and committees had backfired.
Yet it missed the bigger picture. The establishment’s mistake wasn’t in going too far, but in not going far enough. Party officials had spent the past two election cycles pretending that the old rules still applied, that voters would fall meekly in line, that candidates without traditional support would wither and die. In a political climate defined by the extremes, freezing cold or scorching hot, the Republican establishment had been lukewarm, offering respectable support but nothing in the way of overwhelming force.
That could no longer be the case. With a host of vulnerable Senate Democrats facing reelection, Republicans could flip the chamber in 2014—but only if they nominated the right candidates. That meant playing aggressively in primaries. That meant counteracting the right’s energy and money. And that meant marginalizing fringe conservative candidates who could not win in November. If Republicans were going to take back the Senate, they couldn’t afford any more Christine O’Donnells.
“We had taken a passive view of involvement in primaries. In 2014, I said the business model has got to change,” McConnell recalls. “It wasn’t so much a philosophical thing; it was getting quality candidates who can actually appeal to the general electorate. I wasn’t offended by the Tea Party. We were glad to have their support. But in order to win in most states you have to have somebody who can be presentable to a larger electorate, and [the Tea Party] produced some people who simply couldn’t win.”
With the aid of their burliest outside allies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as Karl Rove’s group, American Crossroads, McConnell and the Republican establishment set about smothering the Tea Party.
“We called them ‘the Caveman Caucus,’ and we needed to crush them,” recalls Scott Reed, the Chamber’s senior political strategist, who coordinated with state and local affiliates to raise and spend nearly $20 million in Republican primary fights that year. “It was a turning point for us. We felt like we were taking back control of the party in 2014.”
Nobody had entered 2014 wearing a brighter bull’s-eye on his back than McConnell. The bespectacled, gray-haired Senate leader, perpetually poker-faced and soft-spoken in a manner that belied his barbarous instincts, was a political institution unto his own. He had spent the past three decades building the Kentucky GOP from the ground up, earning priceless goodwill and collecting favors across the state. But his DC deal-making and bring-home-the-bacon politics were poorly suited to the Tea Party era. With his numbers sinking in Kentucky, a chorus of conservative outside groups—FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, the Senate Conservatives Fund—made a show of rallying around McConnell’s challenger, a veteran and manufacturing executive named Matt Bevin.
But nobody knew McConnell’s flaws better than McConnell. Having worked tirelessly to forge an alliance with Rand Paul, the Tea Party favorite, McConnell won the junior senator’s endorsement in 2014. He also hired the Paul family’s political consigliere, Jesse Benton, as his campaign manager. (Benton would later be recorded saying he was “holding my nose”1 working for McConnell, citing the advantage it could lend Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential bid.)
Meanwhile, McConnell’s team built an encyclopedia-thick opposition research dossier on Bevin, blanketing the airwaves with attack ads the week his rival entered the race. They branded him “Bailout Bevin” for state funds he’d accepted to rebuild a factory, undermining his conservative bona fides and neutralizing attacks on McConnell’s TARP vote. Buried under millions of dollars in negative ads from McConnell and his outside partners, Bevin’s campaign never got off the ground. McConnell creamed him by 25 points.