The first test of the Republican response to Donald Trump’s attempt to hold power after his election loss came hours after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Members of the House were asked whether they would reject the electoral votes submitted by the state of Arizona, siding with specious arguments about their validity.

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       Most of them chose to do so. A few hours later, the same question arose about Pennsylvania’s votes and, again, most House Republicans voted to reject them.

       Over the next nine months, members of the Republican caucus had multiple additional opportunities to align more closely with Trump or more closely with efforts to hold him to account. By tracking those occasions on which Republicans deviated from the consensus on those votes, we can map out a new polarity within the party, one oriented around democracy itself.

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       To construct this axis, I looked at six other votes related to the riot. There was the vote to impeach Trump for his role in the attack, the vote to form the committee that would investigate the attack and, on Thursday, the vote to hold Stephen K. Bannon in contempt for failing to offer testimony to the committee.

       In the other direction, there were three interesting votes. In response to the attack, the House voted at two different points to award the Congressional Gold Medal to law enforcement who responded on that day and, in each case, a cluster of right-wing legislators opposed the move. Then there was a symbolic but loaded vote aimed at condemning a military coup in Burma. There, again, some Republicans rejected the condemnation, echoing an undercurrent of approval for the act that surfaced in far-right discussion.

       By mapping the occasions on which legislators rejected the caucus consensus on those eight votes, we get a map that looks like this.

       What’s useful about that illustration is that there are three distinct groups that emerge.

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       There’s the group at the top, those who were most supportive of the effort to uphold the election results and condemn Trump’s response to it. It includes Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who voted against impeaching Trump (agreeing with the party majority) but supported the contempt vote for Bannon (in opposition to the majority). And, of course, it includes Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), both of whom serve on the committee itself.

       In the middle are the Republicans who voted to accept at least some of the cast electoral votes but who otherwise went no further. This includes Rep. Greg Pence (R-Ind.) (the former vice president’s brother) and Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), both of whom supported Arizona’s electoral votes, but not Pennsylvania’s. (Earlier this year, in retaliation for her views of the Jan. 6 attack, House Republicans ousted Cheney from the position that Stefanik now holds.)

       Then, at the bottom, are the right-wing legislators who have often managed to gain national attention for their approach to the job. They include Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who has gained attention for other reasons as well.

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       If we assign point values to the various votes, ranging from 10 points for supporting the impeachment to minus-7 for opposing the June vote on awarding gold medals to law enforcement (that vote being a moderated version of a similar March vote), we can distribute the legislators on an axis more explicitly. If we overlay ideology, as measured by VoteView’s DW-Nominate scores, we get a grid.

       The legislators who were more supportive of efforts to introduce accountability for Jan. 6 are near the top — and generally less conservative (i.e., more to the left side of the graph). Those who were more opposed to accountability efforts are also generally more conservative.

       These are the twin axes on which the House caucus operates at the moment, and there is palpable tension between the two vertical poles. After the vote on the Bannon contempt resolution on Thursday, Greene accosted Cheney and a leading Democrat, calling the vote a “joke.”

       The two legislators are not that far apart on ideology, but miles away from one another on efforts to institute some accountability for the Capitol attack.