Jim DeMint may be the most powerful person in the conservative movement today. He was one of the most conservative senators when he was elected to represent South Carolina in 2005, bucking his party to vote against such initiatives as No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

In 2009, DeMint formed the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF), a political action committee backing not only successful candidates, including Pat Toomey (R-PA), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), but also extremists who blew winnable races for the GOP, among them, Richard Mourdock in Indiana, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Todd Akin in Missouri.

Jim DeMint (Heritage Foundation)

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Before James O’Keefe – the right-wing videographer who brought down ACORN with selectively edited videos – there was David Bossie. His most famous film is Hillary: The Movie, which the Federal Election Commission barred Bossie from advertising and airing on pay-per-view TV. That action led to the game-changing decision in Citizens United v. FEC barring the restriction of political spending by corporations, associations or labor unions. 

According to The Washington Post, he was fired for releasing deceptively edited recordings that appeared to implicate the Clintons in wrongdoing related to the Whitewater affair. In 2006, Max Blumenthal wrote in The Nation that Bossie considered himself an “accidental filmmaker.” 

David Bossie (Citizens United)

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Virginia “Ginni” Thomas is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Critics have called out her activism as a potential conflict of interest with her husband’s judicial duties since 2000 – while working for the Heritage Foundation, she collected resumes for George W. Bush’s potential presidential appointments even though the court was still considering Bush v. Gore. She remained at the Heritage Foundation during the Bush presidency, serving as its liaison to the White House.

In 2009, she started the conservative advocacy group Liberty Central and in 2011, a lobby group called Liberty Consulting. 

Ginni Thomas (Liberty Consulting, “Groundswell”)

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Ed Meese moderated the meeting of conservative groups that authored the “blueprint to defunding Obamacare” shortly after the beginning of President Obama’s second term.

Since then, Meese has had his fingers seemingly everywhere in the conservative movement. A senior fellow at Heritage and the Hoover Institution and a board member of the Federalist Society, Meese has been involved with more than 30 right-wing advocacy groups during his long career.

Edwin Meese (Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Federalist Society)

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A former corporate CEO, Chocola cashed in when his company was sold in 2002, then won a congressional seat in Indiana, lost it in 2006 and became head of the Club for Growth in 2009 when the group’s former president, Pat Toomey, was elected to the Senate from Pennsylvania.

Since its founding in 1999, the Club for Growth has bundled campaign cash to support primary candidates who support its economic agenda. Its co-founder and first president, Stephen Moore – currently a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board – said of the group’s focus, "We want to be seen as the tax cut enforcer in the party."

Chris Chocola (Club for Growth)

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Matt Kibbe has been with FreedomWorks since 1986, when it was the Koch brothers-backed Citizens for a Sound Economy. Today the group is the key organizer of the tea party movement, training activists and sponsoring events across the country. The group is best known for its “astroturfing” activities, the practice of masking the sponsors of an ad or other political message to make it seem like it’s coming from a disinterested third party.

Matt Kibbe (FreedomWorks)

Needham, a long-time Heritage staffer, works under DeMint as the CEO of Heritage Action for America, the conservative think tank’s young and aggressive advocacy arm. As Zeke Miller reported for Time, the group “has been working day and night for years to bring about just the crisis now gripping DC.”

“A team of organizers, lobbyists and 20-something social media specialists are harnessing the power of the Tea Party to drive a wrench into Congress’ gears… It uses a three-pronged strategy to twist arms on Capitol Hill: lobbying members on hot-button issues, ranking them publicly on how they vote, and getting word out far and wide when lawmakers buck the conservative line.”

Like the Senate Conservative Fund, Heritage Action’s internecine attacks have angered fellow Republicans. In July, The Wall Street Journal quoted several GOP lawmakers blasting the group for its friendly fire, and in August the National Journal reported that Heritage Action Fund members had been barred from a series of Republican planning meetings.

This week, Politico reported that the Koch Brothers had cut a check for a half-million dollars to Heritage Action, and the same day the group announced that it was no longer backing the shutdown it had worked so hard to precipitate.

Michael Needham (Heritage Action for America)

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The editor of RedState is an influential enforcer of right-wing orthodoxy within the Republican Party, happily blasting away at lawmakers whom he deems insufficiently loyal to the conservative movement’s priorities. He signed the coalition letter demanding the GOP launch this effort and has spent the duration of the showdown praising the Ted Cruz faction and accusing the GOP leadership of being too squishy.

Erick Erickson (RedState)

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The Koch Brothers claim they are “neutral” about shutting down the government in an effort to defund Obamacare. This week, Koch Industries' chief lobbyist Philip Ellender sent a letter to the Senate distancing the company from the shutdown, and insisting that the Kochs wanted to focus on slashing spending rather than Obamacare.

But, as Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire noted in a recent New York Times article, the two “have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort.”

The Koch Brothers

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Senator Mike Lee was on board with linking Obamacare and the budget from the beginning. In mid-July, Lee and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who RedStates’ Erick Erickson has dubbed the “commanders of the conservative army” and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) met in Lee’s office to outline a plan for the defunding campaign. By July 22, Lee was reportedly circulating a letter to get his colleagues on record as being willing to shut down the government to defund Obamacare -- but at the time, Slate’s Dave Weigel notes, the proposal received little attention in the press. Like Cruz, Lee has become a divisive figure within his party. He reportedly drew the ire of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) at a recent closed-door meeting. “[Coburn] said to Cruz and Lee, ‘Don’t pretend to be naïve. You know outside groups are using what you’re doing as ammo against your colleagues,’” a Republican who attended the meeting told The Hill. During Cruz’s fake filibuster last month, Mike Lee was one of the few senators to stick around late into the night.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT)

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Rep. Tom Graves was elected in a 2010 special election, representing a district where Obama received only a quarter of the vote. He is a favorite among tea party groups -- FreedomWorks endorsed him as chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative House caucus -- and he is often credited with coming up with the plan that led to the current shutdown through his first bill, the Defund Obamacare Act, introduced on July 11. Heritage Action encouraged lawmakers to cosponsor the bill -- and 151 did just that. “We are united around a very simple goal,” he said when his bill passed the House in September, “and that is keeping the government open while protecting our constituents from the harmful effects of Obamacare.”

Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA)

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Like Labrador and Meadows, Steve Stockman is one of the core group of House Republicans pushing Boehner to play chicken over funding Obamacare. In early August, Stockman filed a House Resolution that (in his press office’s words) “aims to keep the government open by giving Harry Reid and Barack Obama ample advance notice that every Continuing Resolution and debt ceiling increase the House passes will include language that constructively repeals Obamacare by defunding it.” Stockman was first elected to the House in the early ‘90s and was elected to office again in 2012 after 15 years off.

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX)

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In office for only eight months, Mark Meadows -- a former restaurant owner and Sunday-school Bible teacher -- has been called the “architect of the brink.” In July, he circulated a letter among lawmakers declaring that the signatories would not approve a Continuing Resolution until Obamacare had been defunded. Heritage Action for America endorsed his letter urging all lawmakers to sign it and 79 House Republicans got on board. A few weeks later, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) adopted the course Meadows demanded.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC)

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“This is a fight the American people are demanding,” said Sessions of repealing Obamacare. “We should use every tool at our disposal to address this law and to eventually achieve its permanent repeal and ultimate replacement.” His argument is that Obama and Senate Democrats are unfairly avoiding a debate on the law. During Cruz’s filibuster last month, Sessions, along with Mike Lee, was one of the few senators to stay late. Cruz’s political partnership with Sessions goes back to the immigration reform debate, when the two vehemently opposed the Senate immigration bill, and attempted – unsuccessfully in the end -- to defeat it. 

Though his time in government predates the tea party movement, Sessions is sympathetic to its agenda. “Senator Schumer, and many of our Democratic colleagues have been conducting a sustained attack on the millions of people who supported and identified with the tea party movement. Make no mistake about it. They don’t respect the people in the tea party movement. They demean them in every way virtually every day in this body,” Sessions said in a speech during the early days of the shutdown. “I know the people in the tea party. They care about America, they love America, they can’t understand what is going on here [and] they think we’re moving us into bankruptcy and we forgot the entire concept of constitutional limited government.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

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Facing a self-funded, tea party primary challenger with deep pockets, the Senate minority leader has been pushed to pander to the hard right. As the shutdown fight neared, McConnell backed a bill by David Vitter (R-LA) cutting the Obamacare subsidies to congressional aides. (Ironically, Republicans were the ones to push for Obamacare subsides for their staff in the first place.) But McConnell also diverged from Cruz and Lee, refusing to relink Obamacare funding to the House budget should Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) strip out the House-imposed link by majority vote in the Senate.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

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One of the most outspoken crusaders against Obamacare, tea party-endorsed Raúl Labrador -- elected during the 2010 midterms – also advocates US withdrawal from the United Nations, returning to the Gold Standard and eliminating the Department of Education. In the debt ceiling battle, he has been key in pushing House leadership to the right with his calls to “defund” the law. Labrador has repeatedly insisted that the president and the Democrat-controlled Senate are to blame for the shutdown, not him and his colleagues: “The House is listening to the American people by advocating for a one-year delay of the individual mandate. The Senate, meanwhile, is trying to instigate a shutdown with the hope that Republicans will get the blame. In fact, it will be the Senate that gets blamed for refusing to fix the individual mandate.”

Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-ID)

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Bachmann, founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, has been decrying the coming of Obamacare (and its mythical death panels) since long before many of her like-minded colleagues were elected to office. The president, she explained last month, “can’t wait to get Americans addicted to the crack cocaine of dependency on more government health care.” But it wasn’t until recently, with a critical mass of far-right colleagues winning office, that Bachmann was able to get the speaker of the House’s attention. The shutdown, she said, “is exactly what the public wants.”

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN)

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Rep. Ted Yoho, a former large animal veterinarian specializing in cattle, took office earlier this year, and is a proponent of blowing the debt limit in the name of defunding Obamacare. “We did a town hall the other day, and 74 percent of people said, ‘don’t raise the debt ceiling,’” he told the National Review. For his part, he thinks Congress should move full steam ahead. He told The Washington Post that he doesn't want to raise the debt ceiling -- ever again. “I think we need to have that moment where we realize [we’re] going broke. I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets.”

Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL)

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To the ire of more pragmatic Republicans in the Senate, Ted Cruz has become the faux-populist poster child for linking Obamacare to the budget. During the summer, Heritage Action sent Cruz and his father Rafael on a nine-city bus tour to promote defunding the law, with his father sharing the lessons he learned about “big government” during the Cuban revolution (he was actually on Fidel Castro’s side). An unnamed Republican lawmaker told the Washington Examiner that the “Cruz phenomenon” had “disrupted everybody's plans, both in the administration and certainly within the House Republican leadership… They got surprised a little bit by the Obamacare thing." Even though he is a first-term senator, Cruz is seen by many as the inspiration behind the far-right House  members’ push to create a link between Obamacare and the budget. He has also said that the debt limit should be used by House Republicans during other disputes as a tool to extract concessions.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)