“The last three decades have seen an endless succession of coups, scandals, and humiliations, at times reducing the position of Speaker of the House to a hollowed-out title hardly anybody of note even wanted to claim. By this point, the rituals of plotting and counterplotting are so deeply ingrained that every new Republican Speaker is greeted with built-in opposition and ready speculation as to who will take over as the next Speaker after the newly inaugurated one is inevitably deposed. … The congressional Republican fratricide era began with the rise of Newt Gingrich (more on him shortly). But its intellectual roots stretch back to the early 1960s, when the upstart conservative movement first crawled out of the primordial ooze and set out to seize control of the party.”

— Jonathan Chait

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