Nearly two years later, Boehner and his leadership team finally moved against four of their most frequent Republican antagonists, stripping them of key committee assignments. The move backfired. Conservatives labeled it a "purge," and a month later, three of the targeted members joined with several other colleagues to embarrass Boehner on the floor of the House with a badly-organized attempt to oust him as speaker. The next two years were no easier for the leadership, which continued to struggle passing key legislation without relying on Democrats for help.

That brings us to Tuesday, when the revolt against Boehner more than doubled in size from 2013, and 24 Republicans backed someone else for speaker. Unlike two years ago, this opposition did not catch the leadership by surprise. Within hours of the vote, word got out that the strongest of Boehner's three challengers, Representative Daniel Webster of Florida, and one of his 12 supporters, Rich Nugent of Florida, had been removed from their posts on the Rules Committee. (Whether getting thrown off the Rules Committee, a plum but pretty boring assignment, is actually a punishment is another debate, but its members are appointed by the speaker.) A third dissident, Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, told reporters that within an hour of sending a tweet announcing his intent to vote against Boehner, a committee chairman (whom he would not name) called him to tell him a subcommittee post he wanted was now gone.

Yet even those punishments might not stick. Predictably, conservatives immediately denounced the moves against Webster and Nugent. Ted Yoho, another of Boehner's Florida challengers, was overheard by a Roll Call reporter comparing the speaker to Vladimir Putin and his even stronger-armed Soviet predecessors. "Hey, welcome to the new USSR," he said. (Just an hour or so earlier, Yoho was telling reporters that his beef with Boehner had been "laid to rest" after the speaker vote.) On Wednesday morning, in the first meeting of the full House GOP conference in the new Congress, other conservatives rose to protest any retributive action. "I voiced what I think is an ubiquitous opinion among the conference that revenge should never be any part of any equation like this," Representative Trent Franks, a conservative who had backed Boehner, told reporters afterward. "Nothing sows the seeds of revolution more effectively among family members than vengeful retribution."

At a subsequent press conference, Boehner turned to euphemisms and said that no final decisions about committee assignments had been made, pending "a family conversation" among Republicans. That talk began on Wednesday and would continue. Pointedly, the speaker refused to say whether any of the 20-odd other members who rebelled were safe from punishment. As for Webster and Nugent, they hadn't been returned to the Rules Committee, but neither had their replacements been named.