House Speaker John Boehner will soon abandon one of the top posts in American politics — and conservatives have made it clear that they will not miss him. As Ted Cruz triumphantly cackled to an audience at the Values Voters Summit on Sept. 25: “Yesterday, John Boehner was speaker of the House. Y’all come to town, and somehow that changes. My only request is: Can you come more often?” Soon, the thinking goes, Republicans will be rid of this establishment sellout, and the stage will be set for a real conservative uprising.

It’s hard to believe, given this rhetoric, that Boehner could have fundamentally altered the balance of power between Congress and President Barack Obama to conservatives’ long-term benefit. What happened?

The key moment came in the summer of 2011. The White House, reeling from the disastrous 2010 midterms, saw the tea party’s ascendance as proof that it had to turn its attention to the deficit. It entered into budget talks with GOP leaders, whose rank and file included many new members who had vowed not to increase the nation’s debt ceiling — meaning that they would allow the government to default on its debts unless the president agreed to huge spending cuts.

The leadership at the time encouraged this hardline approach: Freshly minted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told the caucus earlier that year, “I’m asking you to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us.” As Noam Scheiber has reported, the White House at first refused even to consider this option. But by mid-April, the White House “blinked, acknowledging that deficit reduction could be part of the negotiation over the debt limit.”

It’s now clear that the Obama administration badly misjudged its opposition when it chose to include deficit talks as part of the debt-ceiling increase. Deficit fearmongering is nothing new in Washington, of course — but the emboldened Republicans were not sententious Beltway elders delivering stern sermons about belt-tightening. They were a highly energized ideological bloc that saw cost-cutting as an inherent good, and they were wholly untroubled by warnings of economic calamity.

These insurgents had in John Boehner a potentially historic leader, though they didn’t realize it at the time. After talks in spring and summer produced no agreement, President Obama held out hope for a deal as the August deadline crept nearer. Then, in late July, Obama agreed to (among other things) big cuts in Medicare and Social Security. In return, he wanted the comparatively small sum of $800 billion in new tax revenue over the next decade. And although the White House hoped to bring in that revenue by raising taxes, there’s some evidence that they contemplated accepting a “tax reform”-based alternative that, according to Republican economic dogma, would raise the $800 billion by cutting taxes, simplifying the code, and thereby generating the money through an anticipated burst of economic growth.