Last week, for example, Heritage Action, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, staged a conference to showcase the insurgents’ work: a wonkfest that included plans for healthcare, welfare reform and even deregulating college accreditation. Most of the ideas weren’t very new; the novelty, instead, was the focus on the nuts and bolts of changing federal policy instead of red-meat rhetoric about defunding the government.

“We can’t just be against President Obama’s agenda,” Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) said. “We must stand for something.”

Tea party conservatives have also been working to forge deeper institutional ties. The movement may have begun as a grass-roots collection of activists in funny hats, but as Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson of Harvard University have pointed out, it has become powerful by linking those activists to established fundraising organizations such as Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and an old-line conservative think tank, Heritage.

None of this means that the civil war in the GOP is over, just that a smarter tea party may be less inclined to sabotage itself. Almost 90% of John Boehner’s House Republicans voted against the speaker on the debt ceiling, but they didn’t make a scene while doing it.