Mulvaney didn’t dispute the conventional wisdom that Republicans would lose the spin game of a shutdown over Planned Parenthood. But his argument in favor of trying anyway was revealing. The conservative base put Republicans in charge of Congress, and it is the constituency to which the leadership needs to be accountable. And what about the rest of the country? That’s the wrong audience, Mulvaney suggested. “My leadership is trying to appeal to independent and swing voters who don’t care what we do right now and won’t until two or three months before the election,” he told me. The base is paying attention now, in other words. Everyone else will forget about it come election time.

This is, of course, a remarkably cynical view of the current state of American democracy and the ever-shortening attention span of the electorate. But it is instructive as a way to view the latest confrontation on Capitol Hill. It also explains why Boehner has spent much of his speakership banging his head against the wall, and why Beltway insiders awoke Tuesday to read yet another story suggesting his future is in doubt. Mulvaney is not alone in his thinking. He’s secured the written commitment of 28 of his Republican colleagues to oppose any spending bill that does not defund Planned Parenthood—just about enough to force Boehner to rely on Democratic votes to keep the government open.

As I wrote last week, Mulvaney and his allies are trying to use the threat of a coup against Boehner as a way to force him to wage the Planned Parenthood fight. That might not work for a variety of reasons, one of which is that Democrats could bail out Boehner to keep him as speaker. Conservatives like Erick Erickson believe that even if they did, Boehner would be so wounded that his reelection as speaker in 2017 would be impossible. Yet just as Republicans would have over a year to recover politically from any shutdown fallout, so too would Boehner, who has done it before.