While the tea party served as leverage for House Republicans in their negotiations with Democrats before the 2012 election, after the election the tea party faction within the House of Representatives has become a significant problem to Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) in his attempt to avoid a shutdown of the government. Even though the majority of his party agrees with Boehner on the matter, tea partiers are unwilling to compromise. This rift between the Republican establishment and the tea party faction, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein notes, did not come as a surprise to UW Political Science's Christopher Parker, whose research Klein cites to underscore that "Republicans have splintered into two distinct political groups that uneasily share a single party." The article entitled "The Shutdown is a Republican Civil War" was published in the Washington Post on October 5th, 2013.