A funny thing happened on the way to government shutdown last night. Representative Kerry Bentivolio (R., Mich.) tells me that when the House was having one of its last votes before the shutdown, he found himself being whipped by a surprising pair of congressmen: Representative Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), the House majority whip, and Representative Justin Amash (R., Mich.), who’s practically made a career out of butting heads with leadership.

Bentivolio wasn’t sure how to vote on the measure, which included the Vitter amendment, as well as a one-year delay of the individual mandate. He’d promised his constituents he wouldn’t vote to fund the Affordable Care Act, and he didn’t want the House to cave. So he’d asked a number of people what to do — tea-party leaders in his district told him to support the motion, but his staff told him to oppose it — and by the time he got to the House floor, he still hadn’t made up his mind.

“So I went up to Justin Amash and asked him, and he said he was voting yes,” says Bentivolio. “And I said, What?”

Amash told him that this was all the House had left, and that they had to stop the president’s “crony friends” from getting waivers, Bentivolio recalls.

“I said, ‘Well wait a minute. In the military — and this is what kind of swayed me — in the military, we never ask a soldier to do something we wouldn’t do.’ And so I said, ‘Okay, you know what, if this is how it’s gotta be, then I’m going to be in this, my staff’s going to be in this, the White House is going to be in this, the unions are going to be in this, big business is going to be in this. Okay. I’ll vote yes.’”

But while that conversation was happening, McCarthy came over and started making a similar argument in favor of voting yes.

“That’s what threw me,” he says, laughing. “Justin Amash and McCarthy are agreeing, and they’re both whipping me into voting yes!”

Nothing like an impending shutdown to bring people together.