The RINO Factory: Why Washington Corrupts Every Conservative Leader It Touches
Conservatives have a leadership problem they can't solve by firing leaders. A framework from twenty years of political trench warfare explains why.
Conservatives are very angry with John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader.
That frustration is hardly unjustified. Thune’s unwillingness to do all he can to force a “talking filibuster” to pass the SAVE Act is a tremendous disappointment not just to the base, but to the nearly 80% of Americans who support election integrity.
This isn’t new. For longtime conservative activists, this disappointment is so familiar it might as well be a law of political physics.
A Law of Political Physics
A brief history lesson about conservative legislative leaders: John Boehner became Speaker of the House in 2011 on the Tea Party wave. Within months, activists were calling him “John Maynard Boehner” (a Keynesian insult) as he cut spending deals with the left. By 2014, the Tea Party Patriots circulated petitions demanding his removal. In 2015, after he negotiated yet another costly budget compromise, the House Freedom Caucus forced Boehner to resign.
Paul Ryan replaced Boehner in October 2015. Barely two months later, Ryan led the effort to pass an omnibus spending bill that funded Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities. Rush Limbaugh called it “worse than betrayal.” Ted Cruz said it was “a betrayal of the men and women who elected us.” The frustration never relented. Ryan left after one term, a once promising political career all but over.
Kevin McCarthy became Speaker in January 2023 after 15 ballots and lengthy negotiations with the House Freedom Caucus. Nine months later, after McCarthy bypassed conservatives to negotiate a continuing resolution with Democrats, Republicans gave McCarthy the ignominious distinction of being the first House Speaker ever ousted by his own party.
Mike Johnson replaced McCarthy in October 2023. The base gave him a grace period. Johnson had impeccable conservative credentials. Yet soon enough, he too began cutting deals.
The Senate tells the same sad story. John Thune’s predecessor, Mitch McConnell repeatedly disappointed and exasperated the base. He took control of the Senate in 2015 promising to stop Obama’s agenda. Instead, he funded it. He brokered the deal that ended the government shutdown, and raised the debt limit without extracting any meaningful concessions. In 2018, after years of promising to repeal Obamacare, he failed to deliver and instead cut bipartisan deals on gun control and spending. By 2022, McConnell was supporting Biden’s infrastructure bill while conservatives begged him to block it. Donald Trump called him an “absolute Loser” who “folds every time against the Democrats.”
Now John Thune sits in McConnell’s chair, and the frustration has simply transferred. Different leader, same compromises, same anger.
The Wrong Diagnosis
The conclusion from the base is always the same: We keep electing RINOs who betray us once they get to Washington.
The problem isn’t the weakness of the leaders we elect. It’s the system they enter once elected.
In my book The Political Vise, I tell the story of a 2006 dinner with the late Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, as stalwart a politician as I’ve ever met. I asked him the question that had haunted me for years: Why do conservatives move left once in office while progressives only move further left?
Coburn laughed. “Oklahoma is as conservative a state as it gets. And yet . . . as soon as I arrived in Washington, my calendar began to fill up with all the important people from back home. Every last one of them bought into our vision of limited government. But somehow, the conversations were always the same: ‘Dr. Tom,’ they’d say, ‘we sure are proud of you back home. You’re doing a great job holding the line on spending and earmarks. Keep up the good work. Now, there is one little thing I need to talk to you about . . .’”
Even Tom Coburn—from one of America’s most conservative states—found difficulty resisting the sum total of all the requests for just “one little thing.”
The problem isn’t that we keep electing the wrong people. The problem is that every person we elect walks into the same machinery: the progressive Political Vise.
In the traditional Political Vise, three sides apply pressure to politicians in the middle: the media, the people, and elite influencers (lobbyists, donors, institutional power brokers). Policy gets squeezed out the top based on how much pressure comes from which direction.
In today’s Washington, the Vise has been inverted. The progressive version of the Vise doesn’t squeeze politicians—it squeezes the American people. Politicians, media, and influencers work together to pressure citizens to conform. But for conservative leaders in DC, something even more insidious happens: they find themselves operating inside a progressive Vise without any coordinated counter-pressure.
What the New Leader Actually Walks Into
Think about what a newly elected conservative Speaker or Majority Leader faces.
The DC media will attack them as extreme, radical, dangerous. The lobbyists and institutional powers will threaten funding, access, and support if they don’t compromise.
But the most irresistible pressure comes from institutional norms. Senate tradition demands deference to the minority. Committee assignments reward those who “play well with others.” The “regular order” requires negotiation before confrontation. The unwritten rules (don’t embarrass colleagues, preserve options for future deals, revere the institution above any cause) all push toward accommodation. A leader who defies these norms doesn’t just face resistance. He faces isolation. The machinery of the Senate itself is designed to outlast disruption, and the machinery always seems to win.
The Missing Machine
All that would be bad enough. Here’s the biggest problem: the conservative infrastructure that’s supposed to provide counter-pressure doesn’t operate as a coordinated Vise. Conservative think tanks work independently. Conservative media personalities have different takes (think, for example, of Tucker Carlson vs. Mark Levin on Iran). Donors give to individual causes, not coordinated campaigns. Activists mobilize separately, not strategically.
The base gets angry. The base demands the leader fight harder. But base anger alone isn’t institutional pressure. It’s just noise unless it’s channeled through coordinated machinery that can protect leaders who fight—and squeeze leaders who don’t.
It doesn’t have to be this way. During COVID, Governor Ron DeSantis successfully resisted the entire progressive Vise. How did he pull it off?
DeSantis had the Florida legislature backing him. He had a conservative media ecosystem supporting him, an alternative donor base sustaining him, and state-level institutional power protecting him. When the progressive Vise squeezed—when every national media outlet called him a murderer, when the public health establishment declared him reckless, when corporate interests threatened boycotts—DeSantis could rely on synchronized institutional counter-pressure.
GOP leaders in Washington cannot always rely on that support. Too often, they walk into the DC Vise alone. At times, the base does rally to provide the necessary counter-pressure. (As I recount in my book, the successful confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh is an outstanding example of the right deploying the Vise to great effect) That rallying, though, is more episodic than it is consistent. And when the counter-pressure doesn’t appear—and conservative leaders compromise under thanks to the progressive squeeze—we call them RINOs and demand their replacement.
So, we fire Boehner and get Ryan. We fire Ryan and get McCarthy. We fire McCarthy and get Johnson. We retire McConnell and get Thune. And the cycle continues because we keep replacing the victim of the Vise rather than getting our hands on the levers.
What is the solution? Conservatives must make legislators fear their voters more than they fear their own leaders—and all the special interests operating the Vise. We have to make them fear backlash and the tarnishing of their reputations more than they fear those applying the pressure to vote like RINOs. Until conservatives sufficiently build out the machinery to reclaim the Vise on battles such as Voter ID, we’ll keep firing leaders—and keep getting the same disappointing results.