{B} ack in May of last year, congressional Republicans executed a coup. Despite the GOP’s paltry House majority and the political pressures imposed on them by a hostile press, House Republicans led by then-speaker Kevin McCarthy leveraged a debt-ceiling hike to secure concessions that few thought possible from the Democrat-led Senate and President Joe Biden.

The product of those negotiations, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, established federal spending caps, reclaimed $27 billion in unspent Covid-relief funds from federal agencies, and imposed work requirements on those benefiting from certain social-welfare programs. The law, which went into effect on October 1, 2023, placed a $1.59 trillion ceiling on how much the federal government could spend in fiscal year 2024. But some conservatives objected anyway.

The FRA passed with 314 votes in the House, but more Democrats than Republicans voted “aye” in the end. Some on the right objected to the additional $69 billion in side agreements that were not part of the original legislation, which the Washington Post explained were deigned to “soften the blow of spending caps.” After Mike Johnson took over for McCarthy, he sided with the dissenters. “That’s not what the law says,” Johnson said. “And so, I came in as the new speaker and I said again, as the rule-of-law team, we’re going to follow the law.”

So, negotiations commenced once again. Over the weekend, they produced an agreement in principle on a deal to avoid a government shutdown later this month, but the deal’s topline number — $1.66 trillion in spending for FY 2024 — has conservatives fuming.

“This is a total failure,” read a statement produced by the House Freedom Caucus. In particular, the conservative group is “extremely troubled” to see “House Republican leadership” concede to break through the statutory spending caps hammered out during last year’s negotiations. As the Washington Examiner’s Reese Gorman reported, some House Republicans objected to leadership’s failure to inform the conference of the deal’s terms before they were broadcast on social media. Others resented the deal’s failure to improve on terms McCarthy hashed out — terms to which the Freedom Caucus objected at the time. As one member told Gorman, the GOP “failed to get a more conservative speaker” than McCarthy in elevating Johnson.

If even Mike Johnson cannot meet the measure of what the House GOP’s more ideological members expect from their leaders, it’s possible that those expectations are the problem. The new agreement that has the Right up in arms is not radically distinct from the one McCarthy secured. It managed to extract from Democrats a total of $20 billion in cuts to funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Additionally, it will reclaim $6 billion in unspent Covid funding. In total, Democrats agreed to $30 billion less spending than they’d initially sought. But that $69 billion in discretionary non-defense funding remains intact, which is what you might expect given how much political leverage the GOP has sacrificed since May 2023.

Johnson entered negotiations with Senate Democrats holding a weaker hand than McCarthy. Today, Johnson presides over a measly 219-seat majority. He is speaker by default — having emerged as the consensus candidate only after the fractious Republican conference expended all its energies voting down every other better-known candidate in the conference. His back is up against the deadline to pass at least four of twelve appropriations bills before January 19 or risk a government shutdown — one Democrats would relish and make as visible and painful as possible for Republicans.

Republicans might have been able to flex more muscle in negotiations with Democrats if they’d had the members to back up their ultimatums. But they don’t. The party’s underwhelming performance at the ballot box combined with the exodus of its own members from the lower chamber of Congress limits its options.

And yet, for so many members of the House GOP, these considerations simply do not rate. The party’s more conservative members have already entertained the prospect of a government shutdown to protest against an emerging deal to support Israel and Ukraine’s defense while providing for augmented border security. Many of those same members are unlikely to drop their objections to Johnson’s deal to fund the government before the votes must be cast. As Politico Playbook’s authors note, Johnson could simply suspend the rules and pass this grand bargain with the support of Democratic votes — but that is precisely the tactic that “kicked off the October coup against McCarthy.”

That observation says much more about the mutiny that ousted McCarthy (and, eventually, sent the House GOP’s top fundraiser back to the private sector) than it does about the terms of either this deal or the accord negotiators hammered out last May. What House Republicans resent isn’t the lack of spine among the party’s leaders, though they are quick to indict the quislings in their midst. What they resent are the pressures imposed on congressional leaders by the structure of American government.

Johnson’s critics want the legislative victories that flow from electoral successes in the absence of those electoral successes. They want a pliant Democratic president and a managerially inept Senate Democratic majority — both of which they have, but not in the measure that would yield to conservatives everything on their wish list. They want a speaker who, through sheer force of will, would repudiate Kevin McCarthy’s works by demonstrating how much more he could have achieved if only he’d had the requisite gumption. What they have instead is a speaker constrained by the same political realities that bound McCarthy — a condition that only demonstrates for skeptical observers that McCarthy’s deal was the best one on offer.

There’s a lesson here for those Republicans willing to learn it: If the GOP wants to see Congress pass better legislation, it had best get busy winning elections.