House Insurrections Are Here to Stay
There’s nothing new about a speaker managing dissent. And these fights are likely to intensify.
As Congress plods through a steamy July, its insurgents become more combative. They view their speaker as ideologically impure, faithless to the base, too willing to dilute party doctrine with dollops of bland pragmatism. The intra-party civil war on Capitol Hill is erupting publicly, on cable-news shows and in indignant tweets.
I’m not talking about the contretemps between Nancy Pelosi and the handful of House progressives led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’m referring to exactly four years ago, July 2015, when the archconservative Freedom Caucus staged an
