John Boehner just confirmed everything liberals suspected about the Republican Party

"When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges."

The op-ed hit like a bomb. Mann and Ornstein were institutionalists with wide respect in both parties — Ornstein, in fact, worked (and still works) for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. For them to call out one party as "the core of the problem" in American governance was to violate all the rules of polite Washington society. Their diagnosis was controversial at the time, to put it lightly.

For the most part, Republicans dismissed the critique as motivated by the authors' personal liberalism. "The implicit premise is that Republicans are radical and partisan because they are conservative, and we’d be much better off if we returned to the days when Republicans were content to go in the direction of progressive liberalism, albeit a little bit more slowly," wrote Joseph Postell in the National Review.

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In other words, for a critique like this to really have bite, it would need to come from a true, dyed-in-the-wool Republican. Someone whose loyalty to the party couldn't be questioned. Someone who clearly wanted Republicans to succeed and prosper. Someone like John Boehner.