But months later, Boehner urged his conference to avoid a fight over DHS funding. When the conservatives cried foul and vowed to go their own way, the American Action Network, a powerful outside group staffed by Boehner loyalists, began targeting the likes of Meadows and Mulvaney with ads in their congressional districts accusing them of being “willing to put our security at risk by jeopardizing critical security funding.”18
The Freedom Caucus went ballistic. Members began railing against big, bad General Boehner firing at his own foot soldiers. Their outrage was somewhat amusing: House conservatives had used Boehner as a punching bag for the past four years, taking shots at the Speaker for sport, yet were incensed whenever his leadership allies dared return fire.
Meadows made a statement of protest by refusing to pay his dues to the National Republican Congressional Committee. He also began whispering to friends about orchestrating a new, and operationally different, coup against Boehner. Rather than wait for the official Speaker vote at the beginning of the next Congress, Meadows explained, they could use a parliamentary device to force a vote on Boehner whenever they wanted. The tactic, known as vacating the chair, was rarely used and unfamiliar to many of the conservatives. But it was simultaneously being studied by Massie, the Freedom Caucus outcast who had been researching the procedure for months. As spring turned to summer, Meadows and Massie began comparing notes.
In Congress, the smallest legislative splashes can create the biggest waves. Such was the case in June, when Boehner moved to hold a vote on Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA, granting the president leeway to negotiate trade deals that would come to Congress for up-or-down approval. The issue was not thought to be controversial. Conservatives were free-traders, after all. Even Ted Cruz, whose right-wing antennae were better tuned than those of any Republican alive, had written a joint op-ed with Paul Ryan in April calling for speedy passage of TPA.
But the House rebels wouldn’t fall in line: 34 of them voted to block a rule allowing for a vote on the legislation, forcing the leadership to rely on Democratic votes for passage—and prompting Boehner to strip Meadows of his subcommittee chairmanship.
A long view of the policy issue shows that it marked an inflection point in the GOP’s relationship with trade. Trump had spent the last two years explicitly threatening to slap tariffs on China and Mexico and other commercial partners, something unheard of from any presidential hopeful in recent memory, much less a Republican. It moved the needle: When TPA came to the Senate for approval, Cruz voted no, shocking everyone in the chamber, including his closest allies.
The backstory was simple enough: Cruz’s campaign had been poll-testing the issue and realized that he might suffer crippling blowback from blue-collar voters if he continued to support the agreement. This would be a far steeper price to pay, he decided, than a few weeks of headlines about flip-flopping and the inevitable furious phone call from Ryan, who wondered how Cruz could hang him out to dry on the issue. “It wasn’t good for me, it wasn’t good for the party,” Ryan recalls. “But it was good for Ted.”
The Freedom Caucus’s defiance of Boehner, and the Speaker’s retaliation, represented a point of no return. Boehner tried to keep one step ahead of the conservatives. In July, for example, he called for a congressional investigation into Planned Parenthood after undercover videos showed a top-ranking official with the organization talking callously about the supply of aborted baby parts. (The videos implied that Planned Parenthood was illegally profiting from selling them; this was not the case, though the group’s leadership apologized for the tone taken by their employee.) Even in this instance, Boehner failed to capture the mood of his right flank: Conservatives wanted to promote the videos by showing them in House hearings, but the Speaker held back, worried that they would be sensationalizing the issue, especially given the legal challenges contending that the videos had been shot illegally.
The relationship between the leadership and the conference’s right wing was no longer salvageable. The only question was what conservatives planned to do about it. Meadows wanted to go after Boehner immediately, forcing a vote that summer on the Speaker’s future. Having dissected the parliamentary maneuver with Massie, each lawmaker had prepared a separate draft to file with the House clerk. They both had also sent copies to the outside groups by mid-July, needing air cover in the event of a guerrilla-style attack on the warlord himself.
But the Freedom Caucus leadership was opposed. Calling an emergency meeting of the board, Jordan, the group’s chairman, told Meadows that the timing wasn’t right, that there was no organized opposition, that no alternative speaker had stepped forward, that the Freedom Caucus would suffer irreparable damage to its credibility by lunging at Boehner but failing to take him down. Labrador agreed. So did Mulvaney and Amash and the other board members present. Meadows was on an island. “We didn’t think it was the right timing,” Labrador said. “And we were trying to give Boehner an opportunity to change.”
But Meadows would not budge. Whipping out his cell phone, he played a voice mail for the group. It had been left that morning by his son, Blake, who told his father how proud he was of him for standing on conviction, and quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Meadows’s comrades were puzzled. They had never known him to act on rash emotion. But there was no stopping him. He was determined to file paperwork with the House clerk that would amount to an attempt on Boehner’s political life. What some of them didn’t realize was that Massie was standing at the ready to file his own version of the motion if Meadows didn’t follow through. That was a chance Meadows couldn’t take.
Of course, what nobody knew—outside of Boehner’s three most trusted staffers—was that the Speaker had already settled on his exit date. After the midterm elections, Boehner would announce his retirement on his birthday, November 17.
He never got that chance.
On the afternoon of July 28—Meadows’s birthday, and the last day before Congress adjourned for its August recess—the North Carolina congressman strolled up to the House clerk and handed over a piece of paper. The document claimed that Boehner had endeavored to “consolidate power and centralize decision-making,” while “diminishing the voice of the American People” and using his office to “punish Members who vote according to their conscience instead of the will of the Speaker.”19
As Jordan and Labrador pulled Meadows aside, “raking him over the coals,” according to Massie, the Kentucky congressman leapt in with his congratulations. Contrary to what Jordan and Labrador thought, Massie and Meadows believed the timing of this ambush was perfect.
“The leadership’s job was to keep 218 frogs in a wheelbarrow, but we were going into the August recess, and the wheelbarrow would be unguarded,” Massie explains. “Jim and Raúl were telling Mark, ‘Don’t put this on the Freedom Caucus.’ They didn’t want to be responsible. But now they take credit for it.”
Boehner’s allies were out for blood. Ryan raced to the Speaker’s office, where he was joined by several like-minded members, all of them imploring Boehner to call up the motion and hold a vote immediately, that same day. It would be a show of strength, a middle finger to the Freedom Caucus, putting the right-wing absolutists in their place once and for all. But Boehner waved them off. He wanted to think. None of them realized that he was planning to leave in less than four months anyway. “All these Republicans were going to get crap at home for supporting me, only to have me leave soon after that,” Boehner recalls.