For a brief moment in the last three weeks, some mainstream members of the Republican Party, including Colorado’s own Ken Buck, finally showed some spine against the ugly threats and political tactics employed by extremists in the party.

And then, alas, the moment passed and an extremist Speaker of the House who was one of the central players in the effort to overthrow the results of the 2020 election ascended to power.

It was good while it lasted.

Buck opposed two other candidates for speaker, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, in part because they had refused to accept the results of the 2020 election.

“There’s no way we win the majority if the message we send to the American people is that we believe the election was stolen and we believe that Jan. 6 was OK,” Buck told CNN.

As a result of that principled stand, Buck said he and at least six other Republicans who opposed Jordan received a barrage of ugly threats.

“So far, I’ve had four death threats,” Buck told reporters last week. “I’ve been evicted from my office in Colorado — I have notice of an eviction because the landlord is mad with my voting record on the speaker issue — and everybody in the conference is getting this, so it’s natural. Family members have been approached and threatened, all kinds of things are going on.”

Republican U.S. Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Drew Ferguson of Georgia both posted on social media that they had received death threats after changing their votes in the second round from Jordan to another Republican.

The wife of one Jordan holdout, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, began sleeping with a loaded gun after increasingly menacing calls and texts.

CNN aired harrowing audio from one caller to an unnamed lawmaker’s wife, in which the caller says the lawmaker must vote for Jim Jordan “or more conservative, or you’re going to be [expletive] molested like you can’t ever imagine.”

The threats illustrate just how ugly the political discourse in our country has grown and how normalized political violence and intimidation have become.

This year’s Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) annual American Values Survey underlines this rather dramatically.

“Today, nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,’ up from 15% in 2021,” the survey found. “PRRI has asked this question in eight separate surveys since March 2021. This is the first time support for political violence has peaked above 20%.”

But the last few weeks’ resistance by Buck and others was a striking sign that mainstream, institutionalist Republicans may have finally had enough of the bullying that has come to mark Republican tactics all over the country. Such pressure tactics and intimidation have become far too commonplace, these GOP representatives charged this week. Of course it was President Trump who laid the groundwork for such threats, conditioning his supporters to employ such tactics by giving them tacit and sometimes outright approval.

But the holdouts cast their resistance as a way to show their party that intimidation will not work any more. Buck and others helped solidify opposition to Jordan amid worries that such tactics would continue if he became speaker.

Rep. Jen . Kiggans (R-Va.) put it this way on X: “I was a helicopter pilot in the United States Navy — threats and intimidation tactics will not change my principles and values.”

I took this as a very good sign, since the antidote to such tactics is first and foremost to finally call them out, something so many Republicans have seemed reluctant to do in recent years. The only way to neutralize politics-by-fear is by saying out loud: “This will not work.“ It seemed to me the speaker battle had finally sparked an honest conversation about the extreme ugliness that has come to haunt our political discourse.

The question is, will these three weeks of pushback permanently change anything? Will the reality-based members of the Republican Party finally begin to cut out the cancer that has afflicted the party for far too long?

Alas, the election of Johnson makes me think not much has changed. In the end, this was a rebellion against style more than substance.

When push came to shove, Buck and the supposedly reasonable members of the House Republican conference were happy to defer to Johnson’s hard-line views because they were delivered with a gentle personal style. The standing up to threats stopped short of standing up to the extremism at the heart of those threats.

Buck, who said he wouldn’t be able to support Jim Jordan because of the 2020 election issue, backed Mike Johnson for the post despite Johnson’s central efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Huh?

Johnson played a key role pushing Trump’s false claims of election fraud. In 2020, Johnson organized an amicus brief signed by 126 House Republicans supporting a lawsuit filed by Texas’ attorney general arguing that Texas could challenge the election results in four swing states won by President Biden. The conservative Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit.

At the time, Johnson heavily lobbied fellow Republicans to sign onto the letter, suggesting that Trump would be watching to see who signed, which some members took as a threat.

Buck told reporters Wednesday that Johnson’s “amicus brief is fundamentally different than trying to overturn something on the floor.” Going through the courts was “absolutely appropriate,” according to Buck.

How is it different? And Johnson didn’t just go through the courts. On Jan. 6, 2021, he urged his Republican colleagues to block certification of the election on the grounds that state changes to voting in the face of the pandemic were illegitimate and unconstitutional.

Johnson was one of 147 Republicans who voted against certification of the 2020 election results.

Johnson also advanced the conspiracy theory that Venezuela was somehow involved with the Dominion voting machines.

No matter that he was behind the scenes, quieter, and lower profile, Johnson was one of the architects of trying to overturn the election.

Buck further justified his support for Johnson by saying: “I think it is a mistake (to vote against certification), but I think people make mistakes and still can be really good speakers.”

This totally contradicts what Buck said about Jordan only days before.

Johnson has never repudiated his part in any of this nor even acknowledged Biden is the legitimate president.

Think about that. The person who is second in line for the presidency right now, and would take over should Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris be killed, has never acknowledged that Biden won the election.

“I have not gotten that promise from Mike,” Buck said. “I hope he comes around to that point.”

So here we sit after an encouraging few weeks by many counts with a very sick patient, still.

Alas, the cancer eating away at the Republican Party will take many, many more rounds of chemotherapy and radiation like the last three weeks, apparently, before it is eliminated.

And that’s going to require a lot more backbone — permanent backbone — from people like Ken Buck.