House Speaker John Boehner’s tenuous control over his conference’s Tea Party faction will be being tested in the upcoming weeks and months, as the conservative wing has become increasingly vocal in its frustrations with the Ohio lawmaker’s leadership.
A few conservative House Republicans already have said they won’t support Boehner when House members gather Tuesday to vote for speaker for the 114th Congress. And at least two Republicans — Reps. Louie Gohmert of Texas and Ted Yoho of Florida — are planning to run themselves for the position.
Boehner enjoys enough support among most House Republicans to likely win re-election as speaker without much trouble. Yet opposition to his leadership among Tea Partiers is anything but symbolic, conservatives say.
“There is some real angst about Boehner,” said a conservative Republican strategist who asked not to be identified so he could speak candidly. “There’s just a lot of frustration, and it’s going to be very interesting to see how a lot of these incoming [freshmen] walk the fine line between being responsive to their leadership while also being responsive to their constituents.”
While Tea Party critics say conservative lawmakers privately enjoy having Boehner as speaker to give them a high-profile foil to advance their causes — and themselves — conservatives counter they’re eager and ready for a credible candidate to emerge from their ranks to lead the House GOP conference.
“I’ve been [in the House] for two years, and we lack a leadership and we lack vision of where the country’s going,” Yoho told Fox News on Monday. “And I hear it from members. It’s just not me feeling this.
“Without somebody willing to step up and put their name in the ring, there’s not an alternative.”
The Florida Republican said growing animosity toward Boehner among House Republicans is real and shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“There’s members that have been there for quite a while that are coming out, stepping forward and saying, ‘We will not support Mr. Boehner.’ ”
Gohmert said conservative House Republicans increasingly are turning their backs on Boehner because “we haven’t kept any of our promises” as a conference.
“So we have got to do that, and some of us are ready to stand up and keep our promises,” he told Fox News on Monday.
The Texas Republican said Boehner’s willingness last month to accept a $1.1 trillion “omnibus” budget deal that included significant Democratic compromises was a final straw, saying the speaker has reneged on his previous vow to return Congress to “regular order” by funding government through regular appropriations bills.
“All of these promises were broken with the [omnibus] — we didn’t fight tooth and nail,” Gohmert said. “It was a disaster.”
The influential conservative group FreedomWorks is circulating an online petition supporting the removal of Boehner as speaker, saying he has “betrayed conservatives and cut back-room deals to give President Obama exactly what he wants.
“We can’t accept a Speaker of the House who continually surrenders to Obama’s radical agenda,” said a FreedomWorks statement.
But with Gohmert and Yoho long shots for speaker, House Republicans yearning for a leadership change likely will have to wait at least two years, should the party retain control of the House in 2017.
Rep. Jeff Hensarling of Texas has been long been frequently mentioned as a possible — and legitimate — conservative contender for speaker. But as chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, he appears content to wait for a more advantageous political climate to run, if he does at all.
“Everybody [in the conservative House GOP wing] subscribes to the notion that if you’re going to go after the king, you have to make sure that you kill him, because you’ll only make him stronger if you don’t,” the GOP strategist said. “And nobody has really come up with a way to do that. So [in the meantime] they’re just kind of stuck.”
Still, most conservatives are expected to support Boehner for speaker.
“Most believe that he has done a great job for them overall, and that it is better to oppose the leader you know on some issues than to have a new one to break in,” said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean.
And intra-party opposition to Boehner for speaker is nothing new, as about a dozen conservative Republicans voted for someone else for the position two years ago, at the beginning of 113th Congress.
Boehner ally Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma called any challenges to Boehner for speaker “unprofessional” and “disappointing.”
“I don’t think they’re very serious, and frankly they’re pretty disappointing in the sense that any of these people that wanted to run, could have run in [the] conference elections, and none of them did,” Cole told MSNBC on Monday. “So by going out and not voting for the conference choice, you’re not attacking John Boehner, you’re really attacking the Republican conference that you say you’re part of, so I find it, frankly, pretty unprofessional and very disappointing.”
