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House Speaker John Boehner's resignation announcement was a historic event. Very few speakers have resigned mid-term, and indeed, we could only find five others in history: Jim Wright, who resigned in the face of scandal; John Nance Garner and Schuyler Colfax, who resigned just hours away from the end or beginning of their terms to assume the post of vice president; Andrew Stevenson, who was nominated as ambassador to the United Kingdom; and the singular Henry Clay. Clay actually served as speaker three times and resigned the post twice, once to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent that concluded the War of 1812 and a second time for a much more prosaic reason: He was broke.
Assuming no scandals come to light, this makes Boehner's resignation unique: He simply couldn't handle his unruly Republican caucus.
But Boehner was hardly the first to deal with a fractured or rambunctious party, so why did things go so awry for him? Because the GOP is not just split, it's split between two implacable factions: The dying realists, who are very conservative but still understand that politics is the art of compromise, and the surging nihilists, who are also very conservative but will accept nothing short of total victory and view any partial successes as utter betrayals.
Thus this war over the soul of the Republican Party is about something far deeper than ideology—it's about the very notion of coexistence with beliefs antithetical to your own. Some Republicans can live in that universe, but many more cannot. Boehner belonged to the realist caucus, a position the nihilists have made miserable to occupy. It's no wonder he quit.
And it's gotten far worse over time. Below, we analyze the evolution of the House across the decades, with a close look at three different congresses: One from the late 1960s, one from the mid-90s, and the one that began in 2013.
We'll start in the late 1960s, as the racist Southern white demographic was in the midst of switching from Democratic to Republican allegiance and the issues of the day had the Democrats in turmoil. Here's a plot showing the distribution of ideologies among House members of the time, using the DW-Nominate first-dimension score, a widely respected measure:
The purple region shows the ideological overlap that existed between the two parties at the time, with many conservative Democrats to the right of the most liberal Republicans. As a result, bipartisan wrangling was a relatively simple affair compared to today—there were plenty of folks in the middle who wanted to make deals. What's more, when conservative Democrats grew fed up with their own party (often over matters of race), they didn't need to blow it up—they could, and did, simply become Republicans.
Fast-forward to the late 1990s. Newt Gingrich had recently ushered in his 1994 revolution, sweeping away many of the remaining conservative southern Democrats. That GOP wave left very few members on the "wrong" side of the ideological line, as you can see by the minimal overlap in the middle. Meanwhile, the Republican Party lurched to the right while the Democrats barely budged.
And then we come to just one year ago. The Republican Party is now an amoeba sitting at unprecedented partisan extremes. Democrats, although they've long since lost their conservative wing, haven't pushed much beyond the same leftward boundaries they had in the 1960s. What we saw under Gingrich is happening again, on steroids. For a party so far to the right, there can be no compromise or cooperation with the enemy—the ideological gap is too large. And anyone who does so or proposes to do so? Also the enemy.
There's also no pool of conservative Democrats sitting on the other side of the ideological dividing line. So when the Nihilists refuse to go along with what the Realists want—say, for instance, not doing something crazy stupid like shutting down the government—it's not a simple task for the speaker to pick up Democratic votes. He or she certainly can do so: The most recent temporary budget bill passed thanks to the votes of the entire Democratic caucus plus a minority of Republicans.
But any speaker who would regularly rely on such a coalition would, sooner or later, find him or herself cast out by the Nihilists, which was exactly the sort of fate Boehner was facing. Add to that getting demonized by your party's voters for simply trying to do your job and keep the government running—well, who would want that job, anyway?
