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Now more doctrinaire groups began raising money with the explicit goal of pushing Republican policy to the right. Conservative outfits like the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and Heritage Action for America weren't interested in cutting deals to soothe financial markets. They wanted to energize the despondent core of true believers. Working out of drab, fluorescent-lit offices a few blocks and a world away from the gilded suites of the Capitol, Heritage stoked the primal fear of primary challenges in most members of Congress. It pushed hot-button issues, published rankings to praise the orthodox, and used their clout to punish signs of squishiness. Ideology, not party strategy, was their passion. "We're not good Republicans," Heritage Foundation executive Phillip Truluck boasts. "We're conservatives."
Heritage Action and the others paved the way for the ambitious junior Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, a slick and silver-tongued rookie who appears to have noticed that Obama once had those same credentials. In late July, Heritage began promoting a plan backed by Cruz to turn the approaching budget crisis into a roadblock for Obamacare. Party elites scoffed, then grew worried--for they could see that what was good politics for Cruz might be bad for the greater GOP. "Every smart Republican," recalls a House Republican leadership aide, "saw there was no good end to this."
But the machinery was engaged, and it seemed to have no reverse gear. At home during the August recess, though the headlines screamed Syria, conservative House Republicans heard little from their constituents except opposition to Obamacare. When they returned to Washington, the GOP lawmakers convened a closed-door meeting in the bowels of the Capitol. One by one, members of the rank-and-file took the microphone to report that their voters were demanding a fight against what Representative John Fleming of Louisiana has called "the most dangerous piece of legislation ever passed."
They scoffed at warnings that this was a bad idea. "When your approval rating is at 9% as an institution, we don't have much further to go down," says Tim Huelskamp, a second-term House Republican from Kansas. When a reporter noted that Obama won re-election while boasting of his health care reforms, South Carolina Representative Jeff Duncan, a sophomore Tea Partyer, shot back, "I was re-elected in 2012 too."
Speaker Boehner and his top lieutenant, Eric Cantor of Virginia, preferred to sidestep a shutdown, fearful that it would boomerang on the GOP. They believed that a better chance at confrontation would come along later in the year, when Obama would be forced to seek authority to add more federal debt. But within a few days of reconvening, Boehner's vote-counting whips revealed that the membership did not want to wait. "It wasn't his thing," admits Congressman Pat Tiberi, an ally from Boehner's home state of Ohio. "Leadership clearly would have preferred to have this fight over the debt ceiling."