This isn’t exactly a scoop, but I’m hearing some rumblings from folks in the know on Capitol Hill that the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has had it up to here with the tea party wing of his Republican Party caucus.

Indeed, John Boehner, R-Ohio, has called them out already over their insistence that the government default on its debt obligations if they don’t get spending cuts to offset increases in the national debt.

I’ve long thought of Boehner as a good-government Republican who’s been whipsawed by the tea party cabal within his GOP caucus. He’s been hamstrung by threats of open rebellion among some of those clowns. Back home in his Ohio congressional district, he hears murmurs of candidates challenging him from the right as he runs for re-election.

How much fun can this be? Not much if you’ve worked hard to be second in line — behind the vice president — in the presidential succession queue.

Boehner has been in the House a long time. He’s been a loyal Republican linked more to the “establishment wing” than to the tea party insurgent wing.

What might the future hold for Boehner?

A source close to the speaker has intimated that Boehner is fed up. He well might pack it in after the next Congress convenes in January 2015. It’s looking as though the GOP will strengthen its majority in the House and might even take over the Senate from the Democrats. The question well might be: What will the new House majority look like? Some of the tea leaves are suggesting that Republican ranks will swell with more tea party types, giving Boehner even more grief than he’s experienced already.

Thus, this source indicates, he well might just resign and let the House choose the next pigeon, er, speaker to run the place. Boehner then might go back home, or he might stay in D.C. and become, oh, a lobbyist.

I’ve also learned that this scenario has been discussed openly within the halls of Congress.

Yes, the atmosphere in Washington is toxic. Speaker Boehner’s immediate future plans just might tell us all something quite telling about how poisonous it’s become in the nation’s capital.