As With the Tea Party, Republican Leaders Try to Control a Rebel Army - Seib
When the tea party movement emerged in 2009, Republican leaders assumed they could humor its followers and capture their intensity, while keeping them under control. They were wrong. Instead, the party’s leaders were consumed by the movement they tried to corral, and by the grass-roots anger they thought they could use to their advantage. Tea party energy helped propel Republicans into a House majority and make John Boehner the speaker of the House—yet he was never able to contain the movement he was riding and eventually resigned in frustration. The task of riding herd over the tea party caucus fell to three younger House leaders, who fashioned themselves as the “Young Guns”: Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy. Mr. Ryan became Speaker but he, too, eventually left Congress in frustration. Mr. Cantor was beaten in a Republican primary by a tea party upstart.
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Now, famously, Mr. McCarthy this week appears set on engineering the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney from a House leadership position because she continues to challenge the former president over his unsubstantiated 2020 election claims and to point a finger of blame at him over his role in the Capitol insurrection.
Far more than is commonly realized, this is an attempt not to expand Mr. Trump’s role in the party but to control it. Many Republicans think Ms. Cheney only keeps the spotlight on Mr. Trump by continuing to publicly call him out over the 2020 election, thereby making it harder to move past that chapter. They think she is the one enabling the former president and his love for attention.
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Yet a movement that is fundamentally antiestablishment tends, eventually, to grow jaundiced about those who assume roles in the establishment. The tea party movement arose from anger over taxpayer bailouts of financial companies and homeowners who took unreasonable risks leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. It morphed into anger at Obamacare and federal debt. That anger over federal debt evaporated when the Trump administration began ringing up record budget deficits. Tea party leaders embraced Mr. Trump anyway, largely because he shared their animus toward the political establishment.
Ultimately, the tea party movement was defined mostly by its distrust of that establishment; it was less about ideology and more about attitude. And eventually, of course, it bucked off the Republican leaders who tried to ride it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-with-the-tea-party-republicans-leaders-try-to-control-a-rebel-army-11620654251 (subscription)
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