A GOP revolt in the House: Can Republicans learn from history?
The current Republican uprising in the House of Representatives isn't entirely unprecedented -- but to find similar scenarios, you have to go back about 100 years.
"Around the turn of the century, the Republican party had developed a pretty strict party control regime, where the speaker had a pretty firm hand over the operation of the House," Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. Charles Stewart, co-author of the book "Fighting for the Speakership, the House and the Rise of Party Government," told CBS News.
Stewart says back in 1910, it was liberal Republicans - "progressives" - who tussled with then-Speaker Joseph Cannon to loosen his grip on the gavel.
"This was the so-called 'revolt' against Speaker Cannon," Stewart said.
In the end, Cannon gave in to the insurgents and agreed to changes in the House rules. But progressives, who saw themselves on the rise, demanded more influence. And about a dozen years later in 1923, a handful of Republicans - including future New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia - forced nine ballots for speaker.
"They really had a lot of concerns about procedure and tactics and things like that, the same sorts of things that you see today," University of Virginia Prof. Jeffrey Jenkins told CBS.
Today, conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus are renewing the complaint that too much power is vested in the speaker - that he's able to punish Republicans who go off the reservation, and strip them of committee posts or block their amendments.
Back in 1923, the progressive Republicans brought the House to a halt for two days, only allowing Speaker Fredrick Gillette to grab the gavel after he agreed to more rules reforms. And House Majority Leader Nicholas Longworth wasn't happy.
"When Longworth was elected speaker in the next Congress, he retaliated," Jenkins explained.
The insurgent Republicans were kicked off committees, and eventually, kicked out of the caucus.
"If you weren't willing to go along with the caucus's decision, then the thing you needed to do was realize you were no longer part of the party," Stewart said.
Both Longworth, and his predecessor Cannon, are memorialized on Capitol Hill with House office buildings named in their honor. And there hasn't been a similar insurgency in the GOP until now.
Typically, says Stewart, "the losers are gracious. They rally around the winners and support them on the floor. What we're seeing in the current episode is members of the House Freedom Caucus suggesting that they are not bound by that norm."
Jenkins is skeptical that House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan -- who has come under pressure from his fellow Republicans to run for speaker -- will be able to change the dynamic.
"Is he this transformative leader that's going to suddenly wave his hand and make all of these problems go away? The answer to that is no," the UVA professor said.
Stewart added that Ryan is "a policy wonk kind of guy. He wants to get the job done. That seems to be the old style of working in the House, and that's going away."
Stewart and Jenkins say history doesn't offer much of a guide as to how this will all play out. But Jenkins does point to one example.
"It sort of looks like the battle in 1849 when a group of Whigs decided to hold out and were not going to go along with what the party wanted, and they were called the 'impracticables,'" he said.
Fractured over the fault line of slavery, the Whigs disappeared from the scene a decade later.
Today, if Paul Ryan wants to be the next speaker, he'll have to tackle the demand that he be less powerful than his predecessors. It's a fight with precedents -- that hasn't always worked out for those who've picked it in the past.