John A. Boehner served as Speaker of the House of Representatives for five years before his patience with his party’s hardline Freedom Caucus ran out.

Legislative terrorists, the Ohio Republican called his members after he resigned in 2015. They can’t tell you what they are for. They can tell you everything they are against. They are anarchists. They want total chaos.

Next came Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who lasted three years. The house is broken, he grabs it on the way out.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) lasted nine months.

They’re not conservatives, he said of the Freedom Caucus after they led the charge to oust him as chairman last week. They can’t say they are conservative because they are angry and chaotic.

Do you see a pattern?

Since the Tea Party movement of 2010 elected a wave of anti-establishment conservatives, Republicans in the House of Representatives have become not just divided, but downright dysfunctional.

Members of the Freedom Caucus are not only more conservative than other Republicans; many see their party leaders as opponents.

And they don’t believe in compromise, even when their party has a narrow majority in just one house of Congress and must make deals with the Democratic-led Senate to keep the federal government running.

They regard the party as [too] willing to negotiate with Democrats, said Kevin Kosar, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. [They] run under the Republican label, but get into Congress by destroying Republicans.

Many GOP voters agree with them. A July Economist/YouGov poll found that most Republicans want members of Congress to stick to their principles no matter what, rather than compromise to get things done.

That sentiment is especially strong in districts with large Republican majorities.

Most Democrats surveyed said the opposite: They wanted their representatives to compromise when necessary.

McCarthy’s dilemma was that he was caught between the hardliners’ refusal to compromise and his desire to avoid being blamed for a government shutdown.

On September 30, he sponsored a funding bill to keep the government running for 45 days. It passed the House of Representatives with votes from a slim majority of Republicans and almost every Democrat.

There is no bill that can pass [only] one party or the other, he noted.

But that modest bipartisan compromise sparked a full-scale revolt from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and seven others in the Freedom Caucus. Gaetz demanded a vote on a motion to remove McCarthy as chairman. The eight Freedom Caucus rebels were joined by 208 Democrats, and McCarthy abruptly lost his job.

The irony is that McCarthy was right. When one party has a slim majority in the House of Representatives and the other a slim majority in the Senate, neither can achieve results without bipartisan compromise.

Even in the highly partisan House of Representatives, where conservative Republicans have little common ground with liberal Democrats, a bipartisan majority wanted to avoid a government shutdown.

Why did the Democrats vote out McCarthy?

There are several explanations. First, Democrats, like many Republicans, simply did not trust the cheerful Californian.

He was not a reliable negotiating partner. Weeks after reaching a hard-fought deal with President Biden on spending levels, he walked away from it.

McCarthy regularly collapsed under the pressure of his party. After a mob loyal to then-President Trump stormed the Capitol in January 2021, he denounced their action. But he voted against certifying Biden’s election and rushed to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago to apologize for his defection.

The simplest explanation might be that McCarthy never asked Democrats for help. He knew they would have asked for something in return, perhaps more seats on committees, or a rule change that allowed Gaetz to bring about McCarthy’s ouster. The speaker knew that for every Democratic vote he gained, he risked losing more Republican votes.

But there is also a deeper reason: the House of Representatives is organized along party lines, and has been that way for almost 200 years.

Nearly every member runs for office under a party label, relies on party loyalists for votes, and turns to their party for help with campaign financing.

Party legislation is the norm, and bipartisan initiatives are the exception.

House rules often make cooperation between both parties difficult. Members of two parties may not jointly sponsor bills; Only one sponsor is allowed on a substitution. A bipartisan task force is trying to relax that rule, but its proposal has gone nowhere.

The partisan model is especially strong when it comes to the way the House is organized. Each committee chairman comes from the majority. Since time immemorial, every speaker has been chosen by the majority party.

That paradigm has been around so long that it has almost achieved constitutional status, noted William Galston, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution.

The strongest evidence of this claim is that as soon as McCarthy lost his job, other Republicans prepared to replace him within the same one-party structure that had toppled him.

Republicans in the House of Representatives appear to be hoping that Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), McCarthy’s second in command, or Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a Trump-backed member of the Freedom Caucus, the party with more can bring together success.

But there is little reason to expect a different outcome. The next speaker will struggle with the same unstable majority as his predecessor.

There is an alternative, at least in theory: a coalition president chosen by members of both parties.

Galston, a supporter of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, is promoting the idea.

This crisis could also be an opportunity… to break the traditional paradigm, he said.

His proposal: Members of both parties should support a Republican chairman who agrees to new, less partisan rules.

Moderate Republicans should say no to any new speaker without changing the rules, he said, starting with the rule that allowed Gaetz to oust McCarthy. Moderate Democrats must take a step forward to appear as a reasonable party.

That option won’t come into play if Republicans quickly elect one of their members the old-fashioned way. But if they get stuck, it’s a useful option, Galston said.

And if it doesn’t work this time, it might come in handy later. If history is any guide, the next speaker won’t hold the position for long.