The post-Boehner Congress and Washington's sense of dread

“To get members to bust the budget caps, they have to threaten a Christmas-vacation shutdown for members of Congress,” said Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky and one of the rebels who pushed for Mr. Boehner’s overthrow. “Heaven help the speaker who replaces John Boehner and goes along with that charade.”

Mr. Boehner’s decision is likely to smooth a short-term path around a government shutdown at the end of the month. But the real showdown looms on Dec. 11, when a stopgap spending bill expected to pass this week will expire, and Congress and the president will have to find a way to fund the government through September 2016 and raise its borrowing limit.

The new speaker, elevated to the country’s third-highest constitutional post by a conservative rebellion, will face demands from those same rebels to extract concessions from a president who has little to lose by standing firm.At stake for conservatives will be the one clear victory they have scored since the Tea Party revolution of 2010: firm statutory limits on spending signed into law in 2011, which Mr. Obama has said he can no longer abide.