“You’re not organized enough. It’s too late,” Labrador told Massie. The Kentucky lawmaker was incensed. Other nervous conservatives, he believed, were holding back because Jordan and his friends were.
Ultimately, it was another politician’s death that might have resurrected Boehner’s career: More than a dozen Democrats were out of town attending the funeral of former New York governor Mario Cuomo, lowering the total number of votes cast—thereby also lowering Boehner’s threshold for reaching a majority. Whereas the rebels would have needed 29 votes to force a second ballot in a fully populated House, that number now stretched high into the 30s. When the gavel fell, Boehner, watching on his office television while huffing cigarettes at a pace his friends had never seen, survived 25 defections to remain Speaker of the House.
After four years of making life miserable for Boehner, some of the House’s most problematic members had decided to lay off—and in doing so, they incurred the fury of their constituents back home. Jordan, Labrador, and Mulvaney were inundated with angry phone calls and emails; Labrador alone received more than seven thousand negative comments on his Facebook page, he told friends. The animus they had stirred toward the Speaker, which was turbo-charged through the filters of talk radio and social media, had come back to haunt them.
Luckily, they had a plan in the works that would satiate their voters’ bloodthirst and put Boehner back in the crosshairs.
Months earlier, in a final attempt to reclaim control of the Republican Study Committee, with vows to rewrite its rules and restore its seditious reputation, Mulvaney had run for chairman. But he was defeated. Once again, the RSC’s bloated numbers had worked against the “hard-core” base, and once again, the leadership had played a role, whipping support for Bill Flores, a Texan and former oil-and-gas executive.
It was a breaking point for the conservatives. Justin Amash’s group, the House Liberty Caucus, had served its purpose as a temporary bunker. But now they needed a new outfit—one committed to a certain ideology, yes, but even more so dedicated to tactics that would make them enemies of the Republican state. The group would need bylaws codifying their strategy of strength in numbers. They would need 29 members, enough so that if they voted as a bloc, they could defeat the leadership on any given vote—whether on a “rule” that dictated floor procedures or on the legislation itself.
Weeks after the Speaker election, as House Republicans gathered in Hershey, Pennsylvania, for their annual retreat, a group of nine conservatives put the finishing touches on their new vehicle. All it needed was a name. After debating a host of dreadful suggestions, they settled on House Freedom Caucus because, as Mulvaney later told the New Yorker, “It was so generic and so universally awful that we had no reason to be against it.”
Another name they jokingly considered was the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus. It was good for some laughs; members such as Mulvaney and Labrador had long defended themselves as more pragmatic than the party’s leaders gave them credit for. But the name also carried an implication: Not just anyone would be allowed in. The architects of the cabal, Jordan, Mulvaney, Labrador, Amash, and Mark Meadows, didn’t want the group defined by some of the louder and less thoughtful Republicans in their conference. That meant, at least initially, no Massie, no Michele Bachmann, no Steve King, and no matter how many times he asked, no Louie Gohmert.
“They felt the conservatives needed a sensible effort—not a Thomas Massie/Louie Gohmert effort,” Massie says. “They told each other, ‘We’re not gonna let the crazy ones in.’”
Massie had big plans of his own. A few days after the failed coup against Boehner, he hosted an academic from the Congressional Research Service in his office. He wanted to know about an obscure parliamentary maneuver known as “the motion to vacate the chair.”
BUSH WAS THE FIRST HORSE OUT OF THE GATE—SORT OF.
In December 2014, the consubstantial son and brother, respectively, of the last two Republican presidents announced the formation of Right to Rise PAC, which would serve as an exploratory committee and fund-raising vehicle for his own White House run. Campaign finance laws forbade coordination between candidates and their affiliated PACs; by withholding his official candidacy, Bush was able to work in concert with his new super PAC to raise unlimited sums of money from the country’s biggest donors. It was a post–Citizens United loophole that no presidential candidate had ever exploited, and Bush took full advantage, raising $100 million in a period of six months.7
It was a breathtaking amount of coin to throw at someone who had yet to shake a hand or kiss a baby. Bush’s team took to dubbing their financial conquest “shock and awe,” a preemptive show of force meant to clear the primary field of potential foes. (Unfortunately, given its more recent applications, the term foreshadowed Bush’s woeful quagmire of a campaign.)
The strategy worked at first: Romney, who had weighed a third campaign, saw much of his donor base defecting to Bush and announced that he would stay on the sidelines.
But not everyone was so deterred. In fact, dollar signs notwithstanding, there wasn’t much to be daunted by. Bush had been an imposing figure in Florida, widely viewed as one of the most ruthlessly effective governors in America and a paragon of conservative policymaking. But he had left office nearly a decade ago—with his brother still in office, social media in its infancy, and the Tea Party’s emergence still several years off. The game had changed. There were always going to be concerns about fatigue with the family brand—hence “Jeb!” as his logo—but the more existential predicament for Bush was communicating with a GOP electorate that had been speaking a different language since he left office.
Nobody understood this better than Rubio. The onetime Florida lawmaker had learned at Bush’s knee in Tallahassee, and the governor had helped him ascend to the most powerful office in the statehouse. When he became Speaker, Rubio was gifted a large, golden sword (that of Chang, “a great conservative warrior”) by Bush, who choked up in the House chamber during Rubio’s swearing-in ceremony, “I can’t think back on a time where I’ve ever been prouder to be a Republican, Marco.”8
Despite those ties, Rubio saw Bush’s blind spots—his support for Common Core education standards, his moderation on certain social issues, his support for immigration reform that made his own efforts look tame by comparison—and knew that his old mentor would struggle to connect with the contemporary Republican base.
Bush never saw him coming. Having locked up virtually all of Florida’s major donors and political colossi, not to mention having helped Rubio win his Senate race four years earlier, Bush spent the early months of 2015 dismissing speculation of a challenge from his apprentice. “Listen,” he told a group of Florida Republicans during a meeting in Washington, just after the New Year, “I really believe in my heart that Marco will not run against me.”
It was a fundamental miscalculation—of the climate, of the party, and of Rubio himself. If the 2010 Senate campaign had taught Rubio anything, it was that old rules no longer applied. He had embarrassed Charlie Crist despite being told to wait his turn. Now friends in Florida were telling him the same thing. Rubio wasn’t hearing it. The senator believed himself to be a figure of Obamaesque proportions, someone uniquely suited to a new era of American politics, one where experience mattered less than raw talent.