Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush.

The latest chapter in the unlovely and endless story of Washington dysfunction was written last month, when much of the federal government was shut down for the first time in nearly two decades, and the country was once again brought to the brink of financial default. Among the feuds that gave rise to this disastrous turn, the ones that pitted Democrats against Republicans may well be those that tell us the least about our fractious politics. Instead, it was the close-quarters throwdown within the GOP—a fight in the House Republican Conference between the party’s centrists and its vocal Tea Party activists—that illuminates both why the shutdown happened and what it will mean for a Republican Party at war with itself. It is a narrative best told Rashomon-style, as a story of wildly divergent tellings—and ultimately as an expression of the Republican Party’s all-encompassing identity crisis.

It culminated in October, after nearly a year of plotting. Far-right Republicans—desperate to derail President Barack Obama’s health care law just as it was set to take effect—first seized on the threat of a government shutdown in the hope that such a calamity would force the White House to roll back Obamacare, and next glimpsed opportunity in the fall’s negotiations over raising the U.S. government debt ceiling. The more centrist members of the GOP considered the ploy a kamikaze mission—a predictable debacle that would underscore the party’s inner turmoil.


Over hours of conversation amid the frantic negotiations to end the resulting standoff, I spoke with more than a dozen players on both sides of a party whose divide has never been wider. Without exception, they all described themselves to me as conservatives. Some of them are veteran legislators. Others belong to the Tea Party class of 2010, which ushered the House Republicans into power and then insisted on using that power in ways that challenged orthodox notions of governance. A few are freshmen who make their 2010 predecessors seem ideologically tame by comparison. And one of the storytellers—Michael Needham, of the advocacy group Heritage Action for America—is not a House member at all yet seemed at times to have far more control over the body’s deliberations than even Speaker John Boehner did.

Can reasonable minds disagree about who’s to blame for the shutdown? Perhaps. For the moment, however, the public has been amply polled and clearly faults the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. But the Republicans who tell their stories here aren’t so sure. In their accounts, the fingers are still being pointed, and the next chapters are yet to be written—though they may not produce a clear answer as to where the party is headed. As North Carolina Rep. Renee Ellmers recalled thinking during one contentious conference meeting, “I totally do not understand what is happening here.”

***

The tale begins in January of this year. Following the disappointing November 2012 election and an unsuccessful attempt in December to leverage the “fiscal cliff” crisis into a deal to preserve Bush-era tax cuts, House Republicans met at their annual winter conference in Williamsburg, Va., to plot the way forward. Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy presented a strategy in which the Republican majority would seek to force fiscal concessions from the Democrats when the debt-ceiling deal was due to expire in late spring. (Owing to negotiations and to “extraordinary measures” taken by the Treasury Department, the debt-ceiling deadline would later be pushed to October.) The caucus’s more conservative members felt that was too long to wait, however. They sought an earlier opportunity—such as the impending negotiations over a continuing resolution (CR) to fund government operations—to prevent the president’s signature health care initiative from formally taking effect on Oct. 1.

Jeff Duncan: We always seemed to be kind of kicking the can to the next fight. And we felt like, “We’ve got two fights here, the CR and the debt ceiling—we’re willing to have it sooner rather than later.”

Raúl Labrador: Boehner is informed by his background. And his background is being a bartender—going into a negotiation thinking, you know, “My job is just to get both sides to like each other and pay the tab.” And, at the end of the day, they’re both going to be happy because they’re going to be drinking, and they’re going to leave me a big tip. That’s not the way the negotiations happen here.

Randy Weber: I told the speaker, basically, “You have the reputation outside the Beltway of caving.” And he pretty much told us, “I know it’s out there, but look, here’s the reality of the situation. There are 232 Republicans. So all the Democrats have to do is to peel off 15 Republicans from close districts to get above 218 [for a majority].”

Charlie Dent: There are 180 to 200 members of the House Republican Conference who have an affirmative sense of governance, who understand that we have responsibilities and obligations, and we have to fulfill them. And there are somewhere between two to three dozen members of the House Republican Conference who do not share that same sensibility. And you only need 17 to take down the bill.

***

Despite opposition from conservatives (who preferred to fight over the budget and address Obamacare at the first opportunity), House leaders continued with their strategy to use the debt ceiling to force the White House to negotiate. But events in July changed the dynamic.

Jim Jordan: The big thing that happened was July 2, when the president unilaterally announced, “I’m going to delay the mandate on employers.” The day of that announcement, I called up the majority leader and said, “Look, it’s a whole new world today. We have a chance to delay this thing.”

Mark Meadows: In early July, it was really more about knowing that the people back home were starting to find out more about Obamacare, and how difficult it was for them to either keep their insurance or keep their job. So I went to a number of my colleagues and suggested we send a letter to leadership letting them know that we would encourage them not to bring appropriations forward that would fund Obamacare.

Michael Needham: The hope was that we’d all have the opportunity to spend all of August making the case against Obamacare—leadership, House, Senate, everybody out there making the case.

Adam Kinzinger: I didn’t sign that letter because I thought that was gonna put us in a corner in terms of what we can negotiate. And, as you saw, the majority didn’t sign.

***

The Meadows letter proved a galvanizing moment, however. Eighty House conservatives threw their weight behind it—and, more significantly, so did Heritage Action for America, the young but highly influential and aggressive advocacy wing of the Heritage Foundation think tank. The group funded a summerlong tour across America in an effort to drum up support for the defund-Obamacare movement, with backing from Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah. Not all of the movement's opponents were Democrats.

Devin Nunes: It was a lie, because even if you saw their strategy all the way to the end on defunding—meaning you could somehow get the [Democratic-controlled] Senate to pass it with enough votes to survive a presidential veto, the government is still on the hook for people who signed on to Obamacare. It was a deliberate lie to stir up the base.

Kevin McCarthy: Our biggest argument to our members was: Even if you shut down the government, 94 percent of Obamacare still goes forward. But Cruz said, “No, that’s not true.”

Needham: The fight was to delay the law for a year. Defund it so that the bureaucrats stand back and so the country can really have a true timeout to discuss the implications of a law that we had to pass in order to find out what’s in it. And, you know, people are finding out what’s in it, and workers [are] going from full time to part time and premiums [are] going up.

Dent: I said to our leadership, “Why don’t we talk about entitlements, tax reform? Let’s get some things that will unite Republicans and probably divide Democrats.” The problem with the tactic employed by Senator Cruz was they essentially united Democrats and divided Republicans.

***

To gin up support for defunding Obamacare, Heritage Action and other outside groups prodded unsupportive Republicans throughout the August recess by running ads , sending volunteers to town halls with talking points and circulating warnings that a member’s stance on Obamacare would be “scored”—that is, factored into Heritage Action’s grading system measuring the conservatism of each member of Congress.

Rep. Eric Cantor and other House Republicans on Oct. 1, the first day of the shutdown. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Renee Ellmers: I was not on the [Meadows] letter. I was not going to be on the letter. So then it became this situation where Heritage was scoring anybody who wasn’t on the letter, plus this $550,000 ad buy against us. That’s when I started speaking out: “Hey, why are they doing that? Why are you hating Republicans?”

Kinzinger: If you look at this Republican Party, we’re almost the most monolithic in terms of what we believe. The vast majority of us are pro-life, all of us vote to repeal Obamacare, we all like smaller government. But what’s happened is these outside groups that raise money on trying to say that they’re the defender of liberty and purity—they don’t spend any of that money really on anything but overhead and attacking Republicans. My voter ID says Illinois 16th district—it doesn’t say Heritage Action on it. There are some people that are so eager to do what these groups say, you may as well just let all your staff go and just take your vote recommendations from Heritage Action. You could save the taxpayers some money.

Needham: Politicians in the past had a monopoly on communicating to their constituents. The fact of the matter is, today it is easier for constituents to become well-informed; it’s easier for other people who have different perspectives to inform the constituents. And that may feel like bullying to a member of Congress, but it’s the reality of the world that we live in.

Coming out of the August recess, Cantor proposed a continuing resolution with an attachment that would have forced a Senate vote on whether to defund Obamacare. His intention was to reserve a hard-line negotiating approach for the Oct. 17 debt-ceiling deadline. Conservatives dismissed the plan as a ruse.

McCarthy: Eric had this idea, which I thought was a good idea, because Cruz is asking for a vote on Obamacare. So how can we craft something that gives momentum [to Cruz’s defunding efforts on the Senate side]?

Steve Southerland: One of the responsibilities Eric takes seriously is to not send his troops into a bad situation, where you face the onslaught of muskets that are not gonna miss, OK? And so I think that’s where Eric was when he created that.

Duncan: A lot of us saw right through it—that it was a rider that could be sent over first and then voted on, and then as soon as it was voted on, it would’ve been voted down. Then a clean CR [one that didn’t defund Obamacare] would’ve gone to the Senate, and they would’ve sent that on to the White House. So right off the bat that was a nonstarter with the conservative group.

Nunes: It was clear they weren’t going to have the votes. It was gonna be close, but the same 20 could force their hand. But you should not equate this with winning. This is how you lose in Washington—not holding 218 votes for things that can get 51 votes in the Senate. … I don’t know what it takes for guys to figure that out. You could be in the minority for a long time.

Kinzinger: That was the fork in the road that would have changed where we’d be today.

***

Tom Graves began to amass support for an alternative to Cantor’s plan: a continuing resolution that would delay the implementation of Obamacare for a year. Graves met with Cantor, McCarthy and other House leaders in early September in the speaker’s Ceremonial Office to discuss the idea.

McCarthy: I told Eric we should do this meeting because some have differences of opinion. And everyone was able to get to a place [of compromise]—but not Graves.

Tom Graves: Cantor pushed his plan pretty hard. I listened, and I was trying to find a way to be supportive. As the meeting was drawing to a close, I just went ahead and shared with him where I was, and that was, “I just left my district and seeing my constituents, and if I support what you’re advocating, then I will not be able to go home and tell my constituents I did everything I could to protect them from the harmful effects of Obamacare.”

Labrador: We had several meetings, and we finally coalesced around the concept that turned out to be the Tom Graves bill: a one-year CR in exchange for a one-year delay in Obamacare.

Duncan: How it became the plan, I don’t know—I think there was a lot of outside pressure from outside groups. I think Ted Cruz and what the senators were doing over there had something to do with it. And America got engaged. I think leadership was part of that engagement and [ultimately] they said, “This is the fight, let’s have the fight right now.”

Michael Grimm: Leadership said, “If we do this, we’re gonna end up with nothing.” I’ll give you an analogy, something I know about [as a former FBI agent]. Say you’re on a team going into a house—bad guys inside with hostages, good guys outside. You could just be very aggressive and run in with no game plan and get shot in the head and accomplish nothing. Or we can sit outside, draw up plans, and figure out tactically, “How do we do this so that no one gets hurt?” Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes someone gets hurt. But you at least try: Go in through the window, the basement.

Sen. Ted Cruz faces reporters after a Senate GOP meeting on Oct. 12. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

But on Sept. 18, the house GOP leadership saw that it lacked sufficient votes for the Cantor measure and instead went along with the Graves plan. In an effort to appease both hard-line conservatives and moderate appropriators (who tend to dislike long-term continuing resolutions, since the measures basically replace the work appropriators are supposed to do), they made it a three-month continuing resolution with a full defunding of Obamacare. That same day, Cruz sent out a press release applauding Boehner’s decision—while lamenting that insufficient support existed in the Senate for such a measure. Many House Republicans reacted viscerally to Cruz’s announcement.

McCarthy: People got mad. We were on the floor, and there was a big conversation: “Hey, what’s going on? I thought people on the other side were gonna fight with us.”

Grimm: I felt it was a cowardly act, and it showed that deep down he [Cruz] wasn’t being honest from day one with the American people. He knew all along he didn’t have the votes. He knows deep in his heart the president is never gonna sign a defund bill. He knows that! So all he’s doing is grandstanding to raise money and raise his profile. It’s very selfish.

Ellmers: And nothing. Crickets. Nobody’s holding him responsible. I mean basically he took us off a cliff.

On Friday, Sept. 20, 11 days before funding for the federal government would run out, forcing a shutdown, the House passed the modified Graves CR to fund the government while defunding Obamacare. The vote was 230 to 189 for the bill, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had already declared dead on arrival. Boehner’s next legislative gambit was a CR delaying funding of Obamacare for a year. The Senate voted this down as well. On Sept. 30, with America poised on the brink of a shutdown, hard-line Republicans were exultant, while other GOP members expressed dismay—often openly, as when Devin Nunes described the hard-liners as “lemmings in suicide vests,” which White House press secretary Jay Carney was only too happy to repeat on TV.

Nunes: Yeah, Carney said it. Lots of people used lots of phrases. Mine was just funnier, I think.

Labrador: I know from history that shutting down the government has an immediate impact, but it dissipates after a while. You never have long-term consequences after a shutdown. In fact, the opposite has happened, ironically: If you look at the reports, after shutdowns you actually have economic growth.

Dent: I felt very strongly that nothing good ever comes out of a government shutdown. When one is in the majority, we have an affirmative obligation to govern. It’s that simple. And if we fail in that very basic responsibility, the American people will judge us harshly.

Duncan: I will say this: The times I’ve seen our conference the most unified, the most jovial, are when our conference was actually standing on things that reflect Republican principles.

***

Immediately following the Oct. 1 shutdown, House Republicans began offering piecemeal legislation —to reopen war memorials, restore veterans’ benefits, fund Head Start and the National Institutes of Health—so as to force Democrats either to capitulate or to vote against funding their pet causes. But Obama and Reid held firm. They would not negotiate—not to avert (or later reverse) a government shutdown and not to prevent a government default. Even moderate Republicans were taken aback.

Grimm: One thing leadership didn’t expect was the president saying, “I’m not talking at all.” I don’t think anyone would expect that of a world leader. It’s not like we’re Iran! We’re a co-equal branch of government!

Labrador: Our leadership believes that President Obama would never default on the debt, that he would find a way to not do that. I actually disagree with that. I think … his number-one priority is to destroy the Republican Party.

Weber: The guy wants to be a king, wants to be a dictator. And if we don’t stand up and scream loud and long from the rooftops, who will?

Meadows: [Vice President] Joe Biden knows how to negotiate. I met with him with regards to Syria, and he changed my opinion—I called his chief of staff back to let him know that I was persuaded by what he shared. So I would’ve liked to have seen him involved in this.

House Speaker John Boehner at the Capitol on Oct. 10. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

But the public did not seem moved by the Republicans’ point of view; polls overwhelmingly blamed the GOP for the impasse. In private conference, a few conservatives, such as Tom McClintock, openly expressed disbelief at such numbers, while others called them entirely predictable.

Tom McClintock: I was astonished that the American people were not repulsed by an administration and a Senate refusing to negotiate a shutdown that was being vindictively and ruthlessly amplified, and that, with the Obamacare program unraveling in front of our eyes, the American people weren’t supporting the position we were taking. I don’t know why to this day.

Grimm: There were people who think, “We’re winning.” You can’t argue with that. It’s not based on tangible fact. You’ll say, “What about this poll?” and they’ll pivot—they’ll say, “Well, that’s not accurate.”

Labrador: Making a decision based on a poll that we knew was going to come out before we even engaged in the fight is not the way you show leadership in America. I think you show leadership by clearly articulating to the American people what this fight is about. But I don’t think this conference can handle the fight. They start worrying about what the polls are saying, or about what the negative phone calls are from the district, or about what Wall Street is saying.

Needham: I think that’s refreshing for a lot of people, to see a political party that’s actually willing to take political risk to change policy.

Dent: There was a certain amount of denial going on. Kind of like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the guy who gets his arm cut off: “Oh, it’s just a flesh wound! Come back here and fight again!”

***

In a closed-door conference meeting, moderates pointed to the polls and warned that the Obamacare strategy could cost them the House in next year’s midterm elections. Conservatives responded in turn that capitulation could endanger them in their 2014 primaries.

McCarthy: A moderate stood up and said, “You got a primary? Just win it. I’ve got to win a primary and the general election. So quit crying.”

Labrador: What [the moderates] have said is it doesn’t matter if I lose my primary, because we’re always going to have a Republican [in my district]. What matters is that they can win their general [against a Democrat]. I mean, how arrogant is that? And the other thing they say is that I can actually win my election by taking on the Tea Party. And I’d like to see them try it.

There was a certain amount of denial going on. Kind of like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the guy who gets his arm cut off: “Oh, it’s just a flesh wound! Come back here and fight again!”

Grimm: And what I say to that argument is, “So then you’re admitting you’re not putting your country first, you’re putting your primary first.” I have a tough election every time. But yet I take tough votes all the time, because I have a longer-term outlook to say, “OK, if we go down as a party on these issues, then [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi is gonna have the gavel, and I’ve jeopardized my whole country.” So though this vote isn’t what I want to take, I’ll do this for the country’s sake. And that’s the difference between the two groups.

Wednesday, Oct. 16, loomed as the final day for a debt-ceiling deal before the United States would be unable to borrow, raising the threat that the nation might default on upcoming payments to creditors. On the evening of Monday, Oct. 14, Cruz met in the basement of the Capitol Hill restaurant Tortilla Coast to discuss strategy with several House members. Cruz’s hard-edged approach was losing favor, and among the House attendees, a slightly more practical notion was taking hold—one that had originally been proposed by Louisiana Sen. David Vitter: to deny executive branch officials, members of Congress and their staffers federal health subsidies that many ordinary Americans lack, in hopes that White House and Senate Democratic staffers would pressure their bosses to accept the GOP’s plan. At this point, Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell were cooking up their own solution, but Boehner decided not to wait for a Senate plan. Asking rhetorically, “Is it better to throw a hand grenade or catch one?” he presented his conference with a plan that modified the “Vitter language”—maintaining congressional health care subsidies for Hill staffers—and also repealed Obamacare’s tax on medical devices.

Southerland: Every morning, we start the conference off with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. They asked me to pray, and I’m a vocalist and have sung my whole life. “Amazing Grace” is a glorious song that is very comforting, and when you’re in difficult times—and clearly we’re in difficult times—so I asked everyone to bow their head, and I sang. And, oh yeah, they joined in. It was a low hum, and you could hear it, and it was good.

Nunes: It started out with people feeling it was a decent plan leadership put out, and it was almost like nobody spoke. Then a few people jumped on this Vitter issue.

Labrador: I got up and I just had a simple question. My question was, “Since we have the biggest leverage on the Vitter language, why would you give that up in your negotiations with the Senate? By giving up the issue with the staff, you’re actually giving Harry Reid exactly what he wants, because his staff is apoplectic about this.” Speaker after speaker got up to say, “I agree. The strongest hand we have right now is Vitter.”

***

By lunchtime, House leaders had scrapped their plan and were now informally polling members about what came to be known as the “full Vitter.” At the Capitol Hill Club, Steve Southerland was dining with 15 fellow conservatives when the whip’s office called on his cellphone.

Southerland: I stood up and said, “Here’s the deal, and I don’t need you to pray about this. I need you to tell me who’s yes and who’s no.” Of the 15 there, all were yeses, but three who were undecided. No hard nos. And so I felt all the guys I’m hanging with are on my team. They’re yeses.

McCarthy: They stayed that way until Heritage came after them, and one of them shifted.

Needham: We put out a public key-vote alert that articulated our views on the deal, and it was that it was insufficient. I don’t think we were speaking for ourselves. I think we were speaking for a lot of their constituents.

Southerland: I was in a meeting with Eric [Cantor] and Kevin [McCarthy] at 5, and at 5:30 I could tell—Kevin got up and [his] staff called him. And the numbers had come in, and it was not good—about four dozen that said they were nos.

Kinzinger: And why? Because Heritage Action scored it. A 30-year-old staffer [Needham, who is 31] made a decision that affected the entire legislative process of the United States of America.

Jordan: Between then and 5 o’clock, the president said he’d veto it, Harry Reid said he would table it, and Leader Pelosi said no Democrats are going to vote for it. I’m not saying Heritage didn’t have an impact, but I think with all that together, you had members who said they didn’t want to do it.

Lawmakers wait to enter the House chamber for a rare Saturday session on Oct. 12. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

And so after a day of frenzied grasping for and scrapping of legislative tactics, House Republicans could not come to a consensus. At about 5:30 that Tuesday evening, the House GOP leadership pulled the plug on all legislative efforts. On the morning of Wednesday, Oct. 16—the final day before the debt ceiling was to expire—Boehner’s dispirited conference glumly waited for whatever final deal the Senate and White House would agree upon.

McCarthy: I used a quote one time in conference from Vince Lombardi: “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

Duncan: I felt like when I was back on my high school football team after we lost a big game—sitting in the locker room, reviewing every play, wondering what we could’ve done differently.

Grimm: Some feel like we didn’t do enough, and some members are frustrated that we did too much. How Speaker Boehner and Eric Cantor and the whip kept it together through this fiasco, my hat is off to them.

Labrador: I think frankly the moderates were fed up with the fight—they wanted to end it. I read an article in which Reagan once said about congressional Republicans, “We had rabbits, and we needed tigers.” I don’t think you would have had any major victories, either from the left or the right, if you’re worried about the immediate poll numbers. Nancy Pelosi wasn’t worried when she passed Obamacare—she knew she could potentially lose the majority, but she believed in it and fought for it and sacrificed a lot of her members in the process.

***

That evening, the House acquiesced. In a 285-144 vote (with 87 Republicans joining 198 Democrats to vote yes), lawmakers agreed to an extension of the debt limit and to reopen the government. The only meager concession to conservatives was that the incomes of Obamacare applicants would be verified. The deal was hardly superior to the original Cantor CR plan, and the shutdown had cost the U.S. billions of dollars—not to mention what it had done to the GOP’s approval numbers. With future squabbles over the debt ceiling and a new continuing resolution less than three months away, House Republicans are now at pains to agree on the lessons learned—and a way forward.

Dent: What was committed here was a horrible act of political malpractice. I mean, look what happened in September: The president gets into Syria, and it becomes a debacle. I mean, he was in a really bad place, and then just a handful of our folks were advocating this deeply flawed and poorly thought-out tactic that had no chance of success. It was just the ultimate act of political incompetence.

Kinzinger: I think the shutdown thing’s out of the system. I think the poll numbers are so bad, it’s hard to deny it now.

Rep. Raúl Labrador (left) confers with Rep. Thomas Massie on Oct. 16. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Labrador: If you look at what the polls are saying right now, this is our lowest moment. [But] imagine what’s going to happen a year from now. When Obama continues to force Obamacare on the American people, when people lose their health care, when people lose their doctors, when every single promise that Obama made about Obamacare becomes null and void, you’re gonna see the American people say, “OK, this is a terrible system, and the only way we can get rid of the system is by actually having a Senate that will work with the House Republicans.”

Grimm: My concern right now is we’re gonna be right back here in six weeks.

Needham: A year from now, as Obamacare’s falling apart with all the evidence, being on the side of the party that tried to stop it and went to the length of taking real political risk trying to stop it, is something that will be admirable, and people will want to be associated with. And look, if I were running the House, I’d have a vote on repeal every single month.

Nunes: I don’t think we know where it ends. Not until people learn how the government works.

Dent: I don’t know who redefined conservatism to mean that instability and disorder and chaos are the way that we should proceed as a party. We should be about stability, order, discipline, you know, temperance, certainty—these are conservative virtues and values I was brought up with, and I’m not going to have somebody tell me that those are not good values just because they’re afraid of a primary and they have to behave, frankly, like the far left does. That’s Occupy Wall Street—all this nonsense and disorder, people throwing sleeping bags out in the middle of the sidewalk, defecating in public. Those are the tactics of the left. And so I think we have to have this conversation as Republicans about what it means, once again, to be a conservative.

McCarthy: You have to have principles, but you also have to show you can govern.

Robert Draper is contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of When the Tea Party Came to Town .