House Speaker John Boehner’s last official moment in the media spotlight found him crying: sitting behind Pope Francis during the pontiff’s address to Congress, Boehner – a notorious public cryer – teared up at the homiletic spectacle, and was forced to dry his eyes with a handkerchief.

It was fitting because, over the past five years, Boehner himself has presided over a far less decorous and infinitely more fractious show of ardent faith, as the House Republican majority has been inundated with true believers in the government-hating, austerity-addled Tea Party gospel.

Three years into his tenure, he was forced to broker a disagreeable truce over a Republican-led government shutdown composed of little more than histrionics over the alleged infamies of the Affordable Care Act, long after every branch of government had weighed in, affirmatively, on its soundness. (That this particular uprising was actually spearheaded in the Senate, by arch ideological exhibitionist Ted Cruz, scarcely mattered. Heeding the winds of Tea Party change, Boehner, a deal-making Midwestern business conservative of the old school, knew all too well that the restive Tea Party would send him packing, and so duly hit the Sunday talk show circuit to proclaim that his caucus was determined to “make a stand” regardless of that stand’s doomed practical import or fundamental coherence.)

Before his announcement, Boehner was facing the same demented scenario, with the purist fomenters of Tea Party rebellion reassembling to stage another futile and self-defeating shutdown over the phony culture-war urban legend that Planned Parenthood is carving up fetal body parts for profit. Boehner and his staff gamely tried to fend off both the specter of a shutdown and a leadership challenge from his caucus’ more belligerent culture warriors – as late as yesterday, a Boehner spokesman was assuring the press that the battle-tested speaker “wasn’t going anywhere.” No doubt, however, that a cursory look at the long train of sober spiritual leaders in his caucus lining up to deliver pointless CSPAN tantrums over the outrages of science prompted the longtime Ohio Congressman to mutter some variant of Good Lord, not this again together with a few well-chosen profanities for good measure.

The real significance of Boehner’s surprise announcement of his resignation, though, is that the content-challenged grandstanding of the government shutdown is no longer simply a tactic to let off steam, or to enhance a given House member’s fundraising numbers among the right-wing base; it is the Republican party’s model of governance, tout court. The American right has demonstrated that again and again over a decades-long campaign to gain control of political institutions with the express aim of dramatizing the inefficiency, corruption, and profligacy of the very idea of government. It’s akin to seeing a child smash an X-Box controller into a wall, over and over again, and then proceed to wail over the mangled wreckage that the breakdown was entirely due to a design flaw.

The grim truth that is sending Boehner packing off to the golf green (and eventually, no doubt, to a corner office on K Street) is that the alleged split between the responsible, leadership-minded business wing of the Republican party and the fire-breathing insurgents of the Tea Party is no split at all. As Mike Konczal recently noted in the New Republic, Tea Party leaders on Capitol Hill – who were putatively swept into office in large part by conservative outrage over Republican complicity in the 2008 bank bailouts – now march in virtual lockstep with Wall Street on every major economic issue. Seven years after all that pitchfork-wielding tumult of 2010, the DC-tamed “Tea Party thinks that Wall Street has done nothing wrong,” Konczal writes.

Dig deeper into the funding numbers – the real story of national politics in the post Citizens United age – and the Tea Party realignment of the GOP stands out yet more starkly. During the 2013 shutdown fight, Thomas Ferguson – perhaps the nation’s premier scholar on donor trends in politics – reported an astonishing finding. His team of researchers looked at the flow of campaign cash into the coffers of 2012 congressional candidates and found that the Tea Party rebellion was, for all intents and purposes, a wholly funded subsidiary of Wall Street. “If you count firms that make any contributions at all to these [Tea Party] folks, and you check out the money split among the donors, here’s the hilarious part: No matter how you do it, the too-big-to-fail banks show up as substantial donors of the Tea Party.”

And why not? Ever since Ronald Reagan famously dubbed government “the problem, not the solution” in his historic 1980 presidential campaign, Republican money, Republican leadership and Republican policy have all clustered around the lodestar faith that the basic operations of government – and the existence of a public sphere – were nothing less than a metaphysical affront to the one true faith of unalloyed laissez-faire. Further back still, it was the mission statement pronounced in the very title of Alfred Nock’s 1938 anti-New Deal manifesto, Our Enemy The State.

The only problem with this particular religion, of course, is that it leaves anyone still clinging to a residual impulse to do the actual work of governing – the people’s business, as the DC leadership class used to quaintly call it – without much of reason for being. No doubt Boehner’s successor, be it current House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (the odds-on favorite), or a more intransigent Tea Party true believer like Mike Labrador, the Idaho legislator who went gunning for McCarthy’s job in the last leadership vote, will become ensnared in the same impossible conundrum when a government shutdown looms over, I don’t know, the War on Christmas. And when that day comes, John Boehner will likely be there to give the poor misguided soul a paternal pat on the shoulder, as he settles their bill at Charlie Palmer’s and conducts him out to the nearest front nine.