One reason for inaction is that when the Republicans did take a stand, in 2013, under the initiative of Ted Cruz and others, the public blamed them for the results. A confrontation with Obama led to a partial shutdown of the government. Polls showed Republicans were blamed by 53% of the public. This echoed the experience of 1995, when led by Newt Gingrich the Republicans shut down President Clinton's government to halt excessive spending. Gingrich felt the brunt of the blame then also.
The resulting cautious thinking was demonstrated by Republican Lindsey Graham who said in 2015: "...You want to lose in 2016? Let it be seen that the Republicans in the House and Senate can't govern, then that's the end of our 2016 hopes."
In his book A Time for Truth, Ted Cruz describes the events in 2013 that led to the shutdown. He says that he and Senator Mike Lee had asked their Republican colleagues "What are you going to do to stop Obamacare from kicking in?" and the answer was always nothing, since a fight was risky, and could imperil re-election. Cruz 's idea was that Congress should fund everything except for ObamaCare. This is within the power of Congress, and is known as "the power of the purse." The big obstacle was Obama's veto power, but Cruz hoped that if he got enough Republicans, plus Democrats from "red" (conservative) states, he might put enough pressure on Obama to reach some sort of compromise. Ted's colleagues responded "Absolutely not!" and advised "Wait until the debt ceiling", which did come along, but they did nothing then either.
Cruz and Lee traveled the country to get support, and more than two million Americans signed a petition to stop ObamaCare, and also phoned Capitol Hill. The Senate Republican leadership directed their fire -- not at ObamaCare, but at Cruz. Twenty senators went on every TV channel, and "carpet-bombed" the House Republicans for the initiative.
Cruz emphasized that he did not shut down the government. Obama did. "After every vote to fund the government, Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats said: We don't like your legislation; therefore we're going to shut down the government. "Thus, every time the House voted to fund the government, Senate Democrats voted it down on a party-line vote, and the media dutifully repeated that it was Republicans who had shut down the government."
When the shutdown was over, high-ranking Republican party members were angry that colleagues forcing a shutdown had backed them into a corner and left them shouldering much of the blame for an initiative that they claimed had no chance of succeeding.
In practice, this meant that after 2013 they gave up the "power of the purse" which meant that Democratic initiatives were often impossible to oppose.
This does seem to show that there is a valid complaint against part of "the establishment". The establishment is risk-averse. Another example of this was when John McCain ran for president, with Sarah Palin his candidate for vice president. She said this:
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