From CNN Audio, this is The Assignment.

I'm Audie Cornish.

And there is no higher compliment for an up-and-coming politician than to be called the future of the party.

And in 2010, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy were more than happy to embrace that title.

They even gave themselves a nickname, the Young Guns, which

I'm only going to say it like that from now on.

By now, you've probably seen the cover of that book because the photograph of the three

of them is basically a political meme, because they did, in fact, become a new generation

of conservative leaders, a generation that could not hold on to their House speaker gigs

or survive the wild swing towards Trumpism that happened under their watch.

So today we're bringing in CNN contributor SECup to break down what happened and how their

stories explain the Republican House Speaker mess today.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

It's great to be here.

Is Mess editorializing?

I think that is the technical term. Yeah. Yeah. I had debacle at first and then I was like too

strong. That's too fancy. It was in fact too fancy. I think mess is correct. You know,

it's funny when you just said that the future of the party um there's a

great line in a movie called the contender i don't know if you ever saw it's one of my favorite

political movies and the president says to a fellow democrat you're the future of the democratic

party and you always will be it was this sort of underhanded way of saying, like, you're never, you're never actually

...