Someone has pictures on a bunch of Republicans in Congress and the Supreme Court.
I think every freshman Republican gets "The Talk" from one or more leadership figures shortly after arriving on the Hill. It's a variation on the old theme: "I know you are full of big ideas, but up here - to get some of what you want - you have to go along to get along." The Talk is delivered with the carrot of promised committee assignments and the stick of threatened marginalization and ridicule. After a year or so, most new Reps - not wanting to end up like Ron Paul - simply bow to the inevitable and start voting the way the party leadership demands.
Boehner and his ilk have been around DC long enough that they no longer have any core beliefs. The threat isn't so much exposure of illicit activity by the "other" side (though no doubt 90% of elected officials have something to hide) but of discord and discomfort introduced into relationships they have established over years in DC. They feel they have gotten as much as they possibly could for conservatives out of the system, and that Tea Party-type conservatives are ingrates for not appreciating how well they play the difficult and unwinnable DC insiders game. They argue that DC veterans like Richard Lugar are far more valuable to conservatism than brash Tea Party upstarts who damage relationships built over painful years of writing joint legislation.
In short, Boehner and his group are yelling "Shut up - we've got this!" to conservatives not because they are being blackmailed by Democrats, but because they cannot yet see how the entire corrupt system they've spent their lives learning how to play in is crashing back to Earth at increasing speed. They can't mentally accept that, so they attack the people who point it out rather than the insiders who are accelerating it.