If I had a dollar for every time House Republicans threatened to "oust" one of their own leaders, I could buy Donald Trump's hairpiece.
Some members of the Tuesday Group of House Republican moderates are plotting to oust Co-Chairman Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) from his post amid frustration that he negotiated a deal on the ObamaCare replacement bill with the conservative Freedom Caucus, two Tuesday Group members told The Hill on Wednesday.
At issue is "moderate" MacArthur going off on his own to negotiate healthcare repeal tweaks with the "Freedom Caucus", the group of hardline Tea Party burn-it-all-down types who have long pressed for the repeal of Obamacare no matter how much it costs or who it hurts. The compromise MacArthur somehow stumbled upon was to make the new bill even more hard-right than the old, which seems to indeed be an easy way to get the Freedom Caucus on board but now has MacArthur's group, people who cling bitterly to the useful campaign prop of being not quite as insane as the Freedom Caucus, infuriated.
"There is dissension in the ranks," said one Tuesday Group member who backs MacArthur's ouster. "The Tuesday Group, to me, is a group of concerned, like-minded representatives who discuss issues, not negotiate positions on behalf of the group, but have meetings on Tuesday and have lunch and discuss the pending issues of the day."
The problem for "moderates" here is that if the healthcare repeal bill actually passes, they are truly and severely boned. While the hard-right base might be all-in for repeal, there's widespread agreement among the rest of the polled electorate that they like having decent health insurance very damn much, thank you, and telling your average Fox News viewer that their monthly premiums are going to go up by a whole hell of a lot or their insurance is now going to cover a whole lot less because Freedom isn't working out nearly as well in practice as it did during Paul Ryan's keg parties.
Having the leader of the "moderate" group be an instrumental force in pushing the bill forward gives away the game. They tried very hard to distance themselves from this mess, and Tom MacArthur promptly inserted himself and the "moderates" into being perceived leaders of the repeal effort.
So sure, they're mad. But they're still not likely to do anything about it. These are House Republicans, if they canned their leaders every time they threatened to do so the house speaker would by now be a box of half-eaten pizza.