Watching McCarthy fall short wasn’t exactly shocking. Republican voters braced for a red wave. All the stars had aligned and there was little to no reason why both the House and the Senate shouldn’t have looked like the elevator scene from “The Shining.” All the Republicans had to do was act as a unified force and take it to a severely weakened and demoralized Democrat Party.

Yet, the establishment Republicans stood back and, with upturned noses, practically denounced the new crop of candidates vying against Democrats for seats. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was on record shrugging at candidates and pulling funds from competitive races simply for being critical of him. Some funds from his super PAC were pulled from Arizona and managed to find their way to Lisa Murkowski’s campaign, showing you what kind of GOP McConnell wanted to establish.

(READ: Mitch McConnell’s Super Pac Pulls Funds From Close Senate Races Where the Candidates Are Critical of Him)

While other PACs stepped in to fill the hole McConnell left, the message he sent lingered. Either you’re one of his goons, or you’re on your own. McConnell wants a GOP that looks a lot like him, which is a GOP that would be very business-as-usual. Democrats would find themselves a GOP capable of being walked on and walked over. There’d be small victories paired with massive losses.

This was proven very recently with the passage of the omnibus, a spending bill that looked more like the Democrat Party’s Christmas wish list than anything else. The bill was so irresponsible that Republicans had to get up and denounce their own party’s actions for passing it.

That brings us to McCarthy, a tepid Republican more concerned with achieving power than serving the country and those who elected him. As Joe Cunningham wrote on the matter, McCarthy spent more time trying to rise to power, he forget he was a conservative and shrugged off the principles he had in order to focus on his true goal…himself.

Needless to say, Republican voters have had it and they made it clear to the elected officials that they’ve had it. Only a few seem to be listening, but it’s these few that are standing between McCarthy and the Speakership. Perhaps if the red wave had actually happened and GOP leadership had done its job, then they wouldn’t be having this trouble.

But they didn’t do their job. In fact, they thumbed their nose at Republican voters and allowed their D.C.-soaked brains to overpower their better judgment.

Barack Obama was right when he said “elections have consequences,” and the GOP establishment is seeing the consequences of their actions now. They’re watching the Republican Party that they fractured turn in on itself. They can try to blame everyone else but the truth is that fewer and fewer wish to see a soft GOP.

This failure of McCarthy’s is a rebuke and the establishment can either take this as a lesson or they can ignore it at their own peril.