One of the working titles for the group was the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus. Illustration by Matt Chase

On July 28th, Mark Meadows, a Republican representative from North Carolina, walked to the well of the House and filed a motion to vacate the chair. It’s an obscure parliamentary tool that allows any member of the House to trigger a vote to oust the Speaker. The only other time it had been used was in 1910, during a rebellion by forty-two Progressive Republicans, the Party radicals of the day, against their Speaker, Joseph Gurney Cannon, who was accused of running the House like a tyrant.

Meadows is one of the more active members of the House Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only group of about forty right-wing conservatives that formed at the beginning of this year. Since 2010, when the Party won back the chamber, the House has been engaged in a series of clashes over taxes and spending. Two years ago, House Republicans brought about a government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act and nearly caused the United States to default on its debt. This week, as Congress raced to meet a December 11th deadline to pass the annual legislation that funds the government, the members of the Freedom Caucus had new demands: they wanted to cut funding for Planned Parenthood and restrict Syrian refugees from entering the United States, policies that, if attached to the spending bills, could face a veto from Obama and, potentially, lead to another government shutdown.

To the general public, these fights have played out as a battle between President Obama and Republicans in Congress. But the more critical divide is within the Republican Party, as House Speaker John Boehner discovered. Boehner, who is from Ohio, was elected to Congress in 1990 and rose to the Speakership in 2010. His tenure was marked by an increasingly futile effort to control a group of conservatives that Devin Nunes, a Republican from California and an ally of Boehner’s, once described as “lemmings with suicide vests.” In 2013, to the bafflement of some colleagues, Boehner supported the shutdown, in the hope that the public backlash would expose the group as hopelessly radical. It didn’t work. The group continued to defy Boehner. He tried to regain control as Speaker by marginalizing its members, and they decided that he must be forced out.

Meadows, who was elected in 2012, spent months weighing whether to launch the attack. “It was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done,” he told me recently. “It was a lonely period of time here on Capitol Hill. Even my closest friends didn’t necessarily think it was the right move.”

The decisive moment came on June 4th, when Meadows and his wife were being given a private tour of the Library of Congress. In the South Exhibition Gallery of the Thomas Jefferson Building, below stained-glass ceilings etched with the names of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, the guide showed them one of the first printed copies of the Declaration. Meadows was surprised to see, at the bottom of the document, only the name of John Hancock, in large block type. The guide explained that about two hundred copies of that version, known as the Dunlap Broadside, were printed on July 4, 1776, and one of them was sent off to King George. It was only several weeks later, in early August, that Hancock’s fellow-revolutionaries convened to sign the document.

“He was committing treason,” Meadows said. “When I heard that, it hit me profoundly that this motion to vacate could have only one signature. I wrestled with it for weeks.”

Meadows was feeling pressure from his constituents, who were angry that the G.O.P. leadership kept losing to Obama. “I got an e-mail from a gentleman back home,” Meadows told me. “He said, ‘I’ve worked hard and I’ve given money and yet nothing is happening.’ And this was from a country-club Republican, not a Tea Party activist. That had a real impact.”

On the morning of July 28th, Meadows’s fifty-sixth birthday, he got a voice mail from his son, Blake, encouraging him to go forward with the anti-Boehner plot. Blake read some lines from a famous Teddy Roosevelt speech. “It is not the critic who counts,” Roosevelt said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,” and who, “at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” Listening to the message brought tears to Meadows’s eyes. “I still keep it on my phone,” he told me.

Because there had been only one previous motion to vacate the chair, Meadows had to consult with a parliamentarian. His motion echoed the style and language of the Declaration’s “long train of abuses.” At about 5 p.m., during a series of votes on unrelated legislation, he waded through the crowded House floor, handed a copy of the resolution to the House clerk, and signed his name.

The resolution declared that Boehner “endeavored to consolidate power and centralize decision-making, bypassing the majority of the 435 Members of Congress and the people they represent.” Boehner had “caused the power of Congress to atrophy, thereby making Congress subservient to the Executive and Judicial branches,” and he “uses the power of the office to punish Members.” It provided details about several rules and parliamentary maneuvers that Boehner had allegedly used to control the chamber, and it ended, “Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant.”

The news broke about twenty minutes later, and the subject of conversation on the House floor quickly changed from the bill under debate to Meadows’s effort to overthrow Boehner. “Washington, D.C., had stopped listening,” Meadows told me. “It’s part of why we’re seeing the non-conventional candidates of both parties doing better than a number of us would have anticipated.” His motion was an “act of desperation,” he told me, because he “saw the power of the House of Representatives disappearing.”

The next day, Boehner, asked for his reaction, responded, “You’ve got a member here and a member there who are off the reservation. No big deal.”

Boehner’s troubles and the rise of the Freedom Caucus are the product of resentments and expectations that the G.O.P. leadership has struggled for years to either address or dismiss. In 2009 and 2010, Democrats, who then controlled both the House and the Senate, pushed through the most aggressive domestic agenda since the Great Society. In response, during the 2010 midterm elections Republicans promised to overturn Obama’s entire agenda—the Affordable Care Act, financial regulation, stimulus spending, climate-change regulations—and dramatically cut government. Just before the election, the three House Republican leaders, Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy, promoted a manifesto, called “A Pledge to America,” that, among other things, promised to cut a hundred billion dollars from the budget and return spending to pre-Obama levels. The Republicans won sixty-three seats, taking control of the House, and expanded their ranks in the Senate. In November, 2010, House Republicans unanimously elected Boehner Speaker.

Jeff Duncan, a husky forty-nine-year-old former real-estate executive and auctioneer from South Carolina who was first elected in 2010, recently reread the “Pledge.” Sitting in his office in early November, he handed me a marked-up copy and shook his head. “We came up short in so many ways,” he said.