The eight rebel Republicans who joined with the entire Democratic caucus in the House to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speakership confirmed yesterday that the past month’s otherwise directionless conflict within the House GOP conference was never anything more than a dispute over leadership. But it’s worth remembering that the rebels themselves tried to retrofit a more sympathetic rationale onto their coup when the only thing their intransigence shook loose was the abandonment of Ukraine’s cause. That “victory” was so unsatisfying — such an obvious post hoc rationalization — that it was measured in hours.

Throughout September, House GOP leadership did its best to mollify the conference’s most restive elements. As the clock ticked down to a government shutdown, McCarthy attempted to force the Democratic president and the Democratic Senate to take a deal that would abrogate the terms agreed to in April. Beyond that deal’s terms, which Democrats deeply resented, McCarthy proposed an 8 percent spending cut across all domestic agencies and a resumption of the construction of a barrier along the southern border. The plan stalled amid objections from the conference’s hardliners.

Some, like Representative Matt Gaetz, insisted that all they sought from leadership was the restoration of a process that would preserve fiscal discipline, including votes on “separate single-subject spending bills.” And when his faction scuttled a vote over a rule to advance funding for the Pentagon — an all but explicit shot across leadership’s bow — McCarthy relented. “A few hours later, the Rules Committee put out notice that it would be taking up four bills today at 1 p.m.,” Politico reported. “Defense, Homeland Security, State-Foreign Operations, and the Agriculture-FDA bill.” That plan, too, fell apart amid opposition from the conference’s most restive faction.

Through it all, the GOP’s insurgents offered evolving justifications for their intransigence. Sometimes, their lockout was over the House’s impeachment inquiry targeting Joe Biden, which was moving too slowly for Gaetz’s satisfaction. Sometimes, it was about some ill-defined combination of “women’s issues” and the Right’s rhetorical posture on abortion. Sometimes, it was over the appropriations process itself. The demands from the insurrectionary elements in the House were so fluid that, as the shutdown deadline neared, their colleagues broke ranks to complain in public and on the record about the sheer inscrutability of this faction’s demands. But what Gaetz and company wanted was clear.

If they could shut down the government, it would reflect poorly on McCarthy’s leadership and give them an opening to defenestrate him. If he was forced to keep the government open with the help of Democratic votes, the effect would be the same. Their target was always McCarthy. But when a shutdown was averted at the last minute, with the House managing to advance only a “clean” spending bill that did little more than sacrifice aid to Ukraine, the Right’s mutineers took a victory lap and claimed that this was always their objective.

In the hours before the Senate reluctantly consented to the House’s final attempt to avoid a shutdown, restive Republicans tried to suggest that it was, in fact, Senate Democrats who sought a federal work stoppage, and only over something as tawdry as helping preserve Ukraine’s sovereignty. “Are Democrats willing to shut down the govt [because] of not enough Ukraine funding?” Representative Nancy Mace asked pointedly. “Sounds like it.” The faction’s allies in the Senate — J. D. Vance, most notably — worked tirelessly to incept the idea that the shutdown showdown had always been over a piddling $6 billion item in $1 trillion-plus measures to keep the government open. Ultimately, Democrats acquiesced again, and the crisis was briefly averted.

But the crisis was the goal. So, the Right’s hardliners pursued their strategy to oust McCarthy from leadership anyway. They succeeded. McCarthy has been removed from his post, albeit with no clear successor in line and no way to move forward with House business in the absence of a confirmed speaker. McCarthy sought to lead the Republican conference by uniting Republicans, moving Republican legislation with Republican votes. But that effort came to naught, and a new strategy will emerge to keep the federal government’s lights on – one that the party’s hardliners are sure to rail against.

If the insurrectionary Right’s supporters in the Republican ecosystem genuinely believed that Ukraine funding is the hill on which they expect their representatives to die, those voters should be frustrated today. The only GOP-led legislative body is in chaos amid negotiations over an omnibus spending package, and supplemental assistance for Ukraine is hardly a dead letter in this Congress. The putsch revealed once and for all that the cause of Ukrainians fighting and dying to repel a Russian invasion was never the real sticking point. It was always about power.