the last book I ever read (Tim Alberta's American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, excerpt eight)

from American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump by Tim Alberta:

Mark Meadows had never quite fit the mold of a Freedom Caucus radical. Unfailingly polite and winsome, with the faintest trace of a sweet-tea accent and his hand always on someone’s shoulder, the North Carolina congressman was as threatening as a sweater-clad kitten.

He was conservative, sure, but nobody’s idea of a firebrand. When word leaked to the GOP leadership that Meadows had been involved in the plotting against Boehner in 2013—even though he ultimately did not oppose him—the brand-new lawmaker requested a meeting with the Speaker. “He’s on the couch, sitting across from me in my chair, and suddenly he slides off the couch, down onto his knees, and puts his hands together in front of his chest,” Boehner recalls. He says, ‘Mr. Speaker, will you please forgive me?’”

Boehner’s chief of staff, Mike Sommers, who witnessed the encounter, said it was “the strangest behavior I had ever seen in Congress.”