I guess their little “we’re supporting Ryan, not endorsing him” gambit didn’t work.

The “fix” the republic needs is Paul Ryan? The man who never met a bailout he didn’t like? A man who asked to be made king? 100% support and you can’t vote him out?

Your solution is MORE POWER FOR THE SPEAKER?!?!?!?

I am quite frankly pissed and I am guessing so is my audience.

This feels like a betrayal of everything you told us you needed, wanted and asked for.

Maybe you made some back room deal,(another violation of our trust) and I sure would like to hear the deal you made, but you have just jumped the shark.

Lots of agreement with those sentiments in the comments to Beck’s Facebook post. Is it really true, though, that the Freedom Caucus sold out to Ryan in quasi-endorsing him? According to Politico’s sources, he sounded open to most of the reforms the FC’s been pushing — with the notable exception, of course, of ousting the Speaker with a motion to vacate the chair.

Restructure the powerful House Republican Steering Committee so it better represents the membership? Broadly speaking, it made sense, Ryan told the two-dozen members gathered in his Capitol office suite — and it could happen quite quickly. He never loved the makeup of the panel, anyway.

Ryan, who has headed two committees, also liked their idea of empowering chairmen. He said he would not advance contentious bills without support from a majority of the majority of the House Republican Conference — adhering to the much-talked-about Hastert rule. Ryan said he wouldn’t pursue immigration reform while Obama is in office, and vowed that any immigration-related legislation would have to adhere to the Hastert rule.

Discuss sweeping changes to the House rules? Change the way committee chairs are elected? There are a lot of good ideas, Ryan said, and they all merit a broader conversation with all Republicans. Ryan made it clear that groups like the Freedom Caucus would have a place at the table in Ryan’s speakership; they would have buy-in. The Freedom Caucus was even inclined to support Ryan’s push to overhaul the “motion to vacate,” a rarely invoked procedural mechanism that one of its members used to begin to push John Boehner out of the speakership.

The FC wants three things procedurally. The first is more conservative representation on the Steering Committee, which influences all other House committees by choosing their membership. Sounds like Ryan’s okay with that in principle, at least. The second, related to the first, is a return to “regular order,” which calls for bills to start in committee and advance from there rather than being handed down by the Speaker from on high. Sounds like Ryan’s open to that too. The point of those reforms, obviously, is to give House conservatives greater influence over legislation as it’s being written. The third thing the Freedom Caucus wants is to retain the right of any member to bring a motion to vacate the chair. Obviously Ryan’s got a problem with that, but his spokesman said yesterday that he’s not demanding the end to such motions altogether. What he wants to do is raise the threshold needed to bring the motion to the floor — maybe a majority of the whole House, maybe some critical minority, but something more stringent than leaving each member with the right to move against the Speaker at any time.

I’m surprised that the Freedom Caucus might be willing to bargain on that but maybe they figure that if Ryan meets their first two procedural demands then making it easy to try to vacate the chair becomes less important. A more decentralized House with conservatives in positions of greater power should, in theory, create fewer situations where the tea party would have reason to revolt against the Speaker. The motion to vacate in its current incarnation might be little more than leverage for the FC to get more substantive lawmaking reforms from the new leadership. And given the numbers in favor of him inside the caucus, Ryan doesn’t need to drive a hard bargain on getting rid of the motion to vacate right now anyway. Politico claims there was somewhere between nine and 11 votes against him in the caucus, which would fit with the caucus’s own statement yesterday about “supermajority” support. If that’s true then any motion to vacate right now would fail: It would take 30 Republican votes at a minimum to deny a sitting Speaker the 218 he needs to continue in the job. That’s why Ryan agreed to run for Speaker despite not landing the Freedom Caucus’s formal endorsement. He has enough support among their members even without the formal endorsement to guarantee that he won’t be removed as Speaker anytime soon.

The more I think about it, the more it seems like the arrangement reached between him and the Freedom Caucus is a lot like the mutual “probation period” I hypothesized yesterday. They’re going to give Ryan 15 months to see if he’s true to his word about granting the reforms they want; Ryan in turn is going to give them 15 months to see if he likes the job and can work with them without threats of revolt. If Ryan betrays them by changing his mind on reforms, no problem. The FC still has a motion to vacate the chair in its pocket and a new Speaker election in 2017 where, if they vote as a bloc, they’ll have the numbers needed to block Ryan. If the FC betrays Ryan with brinksmanship and unrealistic demands, no problem. Ryan will simply decide next year that the job really isn’t for him and that he has more important things to do, like being a dad to his young kids, than to screw around with House politics. The key line in last night’s statements from the Freedom Caucus was this one: “While no consensus exists among members of the House Freedom Caucus regarding Chairman Ryan’s preconditions for serving, we believe that these issues can be resolved within our Conference in due time.” Exactly — “in due time” is the probation period, the 15 months to come during which each of the two sides knows that the other won’t do anything too confrontational for fear of kicking up another “GOP disarray!” narrative right before the election. They’ll spend the next year seeing if they can reach a mutually beneficial arrangement on how to run the House. I think the upside’s higher than the downside. That’s why the FC was willing to give him a shot and why Ryan was willing to continue despite not landing their formal endorsement.