Meadows’s recent comments have seemed to suggest that the savoir-faire that defined the Freedom Caucus’s move against Boehner has evaporated. Last week, he intimated to me in an interview that, depending on the outcome of immigration legislation in the House, his caucus could move against Republican leadership. When I asked if he’d consider filing a motion to vacate the chair against Ryan, Boehner’s successor, Meadows smiled and declined to comment. The next day, he grabbed headlines again when he told reporters that the immigration bill represented a “defining moment for this speaker: If he gets it wrong, it will have consequences for him.” (Meadows’s spokesman quickly tried to soften his boss’s words, tweeting that Meadows was calling for the House to “start leading” and that he was “not calling for a personnel change.” The congressman’s office did not respond to a request for comment on this story.)



Yet there’s little path forward for a coup when a Republican holds the White House and public opinion is increasingly favorable to the GOP’s major policy accomplishment, tax reform. For many House Republicans and their aides, these dynamics make the Freedom Caucus’s veiled threats difficult to understand. They also underscore the danger that comes from building political power based on rejectionism: When a party’s base has little problem with its leadership, there’s less appetite for those whose cachet comes from fighting those leaders. “The Freedom Caucus’s effectiveness is driven by their ability to keep a block of votes together, to block or stop action,” said Representative Charlie Dent, the co-chairman of the moderate Tuesday Group. “It’s a problem for them when there’s nothing, really, to block.”

“I think it would be untimely, unfortunate, and inappropriate to try to do something like [a motion to vacate],” echoed Representative Bill Flores, the former chairman of the Republican Study Committee, another conservative group. “And it would ultimately fail.”

There are several reasons why the Boehner era was ripe for a mutiny and why the current moment is not. When the Tea Party wave crested in 2010, new conservative members came to Congress intent on rolling back a chunk of then-President Barack Obama’s policies—despite the fact that Republicans held only the lower chamber. That idealism enraptured the GOP base. Suddenly, conservative influence groups such as Heritage Action began shaping their fundraising apparatuses around the repeal of Obamacare. Lawmakers like Texas Senator Ted Cruz canvassed the nation with calls to slash the individual mandate. Even House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, an establishment Republican, indulged the frenzy, promising his colleagues a vote on a full repeal.

If there were Republicans who questioned their ability to repeal and replace a law whose namesake still held the White House, they were quiet. As Cantor told me last summer, “If you’ve got that anger working for you, you’re gonna let it be.”