For all the beefs with GOP leadership, and the conservative qualms with McCarthy, nobody was stepping forward to thwart his coronation. So, Labrador took it upon himself. He waged a sacrificial lamb campaign, arguing for sweeping structural changes that would make Congress a bottom-up institution by empowering individual members to drive a wide-open policymaking process free of meddling from the party’s leadership. His pleas fell on deaf ears. The truth was, most rank-and-file members of Congress had come to appreciate the heavy hand of leadership, recognizing the fine line between inclusivity and anarchy. Even among Labrador’s fellow 2010 classmates, many had come around to view Boehner’s iron fist as necessary—reductive, certainly, but effective in corralling an unruly conference.
Take Tom Graves, for example. Once the handpicked conservative to lead the Republican Study Committee, and a co-architect of the Defund Obamacare strategy, Graves had retreated from the front lines in 2014. He worried that the party was inflicting too much damage on itself in the name of ideological rigidity. Inside the room, as the House Republicans prepared to vote, Graves watched his former mentor Jim Jordan stand to nominate Labrador for majority leader. Then Graves, to the shock of conservatives in the crowd, rose to nominate McCarthy.
Labrador was disgusted. “I have never seen a person change so much over a period of time,” he said of Graves. “He’s totally different than he was when he first came here.”
But Labrador had changed, too. “I’m no longer mad at the leadership. It’s not their fault. It’s really the membership that has failed, not the leadership,” he says. “The membership wants leadership to exercise a strong hand because they want this game to continue. It protects them from making tough decisions. . . . It’s much easier to go along and get along with leadership, to do what the special interest groups want you to do, because they’re all going to give you money for your campaign and help you get reelected.”
McCarthy won the internal election in a rout. And to replace him as majority whip, Republicans chose Steve Scalise, who, while alienating some of the more vocal conservatives with his chairmanship of the RSC, had endeared himself to a much broader swath of the conference.
Boehner had a new leadership team but an old set of problems. Obama was threatening further unilateral action on immigration and health care. The Speaker’s members were demanding a more forceful response; Boehner obliged them in the form of a lawsuit against the president alleging abuses of executive power in implementing Obamacare, strategically filed one day after the administration expanded the DACA program to shield another four million illegal immigrants from deportation.
But the Speaker could not satiate the bloodthirst of his base. The conservative insurgency, kept at bay for much of the year, had regained its strength thanks to Cantor’s defeat and Obama’s brazen defiance of the coequal legislative branch. The time and money spent by Republican elites trouncing far-right challengers in 2014 would be an asterisk in future political science textbooks. Far from being tamed, the GOP’s fratricidal tendencies had been further emboldened.
Jon Runyan, a former all-pro tackle in the National Football League, won a congressional seat in 2010 before abruptly quitting in 2014. Days before his departure, I asked him what the biggest difference was between playing in the NFL and serving in Congress as a Republican. “When you’re on the football field, you only hit the guy wearing the other jersey,” Runyan said. “Up here, the jerseys don’t matter. You have no idea who’s going to hit you.”
THE PARTY WAS AT WAR WITH ITSELF, AND SO WAS THE COUNTRY.
In the summer of 2014, a pair of high-profile killings of unarmed black men by white policemen revived the national argument around race and equality—and predictably, fractured it along tribal boundaries.
The deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, just outside St. Louis, and the subsequent decisions not to indict the officers involved, set off a national furor. The fatal incidents became intertwined and practically synonymous. Politically, the proximity of timing in the Garner and Brown cases, and their conflation in the national subconscious, amounted to a choose-your-own-adventure experience for Americans already living in silos.
Liberals angered by generations of unchecked police misconduct in minority communities (enabled by systemic inequalities in the judicial system) saw white cops getting off scot-free for murdering unarmed black men.
Conservatives riled by an ethos of disrespect toward law enforcement (one perpetuated by popular culture, rap music in particular) saw black rioters ravaging their own communities in response to the killing of known criminals.
Many whites scoffed at the sight of black celebrities striking the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” pose, considering that the slogan, inspired by Brown’s killing, was rooted in an account7 that was proved false. (As the Washington Post’s Fact Checker determined, “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ did not happen in Ferguson.”8) Many blacks, meanwhile, fumed at how their appropriation of such a symbol was construed through the lens of a single incident rather than a vast body of racial injustice.
A Pew Research poll released late in the year confirmed this experiential and identity-driven disconnect. A full 80 percent of black respondents said that the grand jury had erred in failing to indict the officer who shot Brown, and 90 percent said the same of the officer who killed Garner. Among white respondents, those numbers were 23 percent and 47 percent, respectively.9
Obama made a game attempt to split the baby, sensitive to the warring perceptions that he was either stoking racial divisions by empathizing with the struggles of the black community or turning his back on his heritage by touting the difficult, admirable work of law enforcement.
It did little good. A Politico poll taken in the aftermath of the Ferguson unrest found that just 6 percent of voters in battleground states and congressional districts thought race relations had improved under the first black president, while 46 percent said they had gotten worse.10
The Democratic Party was already bracing for a bruising midterm election. A polarizing president and a summer framed by racial and cultural friction weren’t helping their cause.
EVEN BEFORE ELECTION DAY 2014, CONSERVATIVES HAD BEGUN LOOKING ahead to the 2016 presidential campaign.
It was an article of faith on the right that the past two general elections had been lost not because of Obama’s popularity, but because Republicans had nominated moderate opponents who failed to mobilize the party’s base. This was the result of divided loyalties: In 2008, conservatives split their votes between Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, allowing John McCain to win with plurality support; a similar dynamic played out in 2012, when Romney won the nomination thanks to prolonged divisions between Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. In truth, it seemed there was no pleasing the base; many conservatives had not been happy with the GOP’s presidential nominee since 1984.
With 2016 approaching, and Jeb Bush making noise about raising unprecedented sums of campaign cash to clear the Republican primary field of potential challengers, leaders of the conservative movement agreed on an urgent priority: to coalesce behind a single candidate, as early as possible, to stand a chance of defeating the establishment.
Spearheading this effort was Tony Perkins. A former Marine, police officer, and state lawmaker in Louisiana, Perkins was best known as president of the Family Research Council. But his more covert, more consequential title was as president of the Council for National Policy. Founded in 1981 as a rallying point for politically active Christian conservatives, CNP had evolved into a forward operating base for the entire conservative movement, an umbrella organization that housed the leaders of the biggest national and state-based activist groups on the right. Meeting in private three times each year, CNP’s invitation-only membership would host prominent guests to give lectures, legislative updates, and insights from Washington’s smoke-filled rooms.