GOP megadonors finance major campaign against potential House rabble-rousers

Table Of Content

• During Trump administration
• The caucus has wielded a lot of power in past fights.
• Political activity
• October 24, 2023 - Rep. Mike Johnson selected as next speaker nominee
• A Wild Day in the House Could Cost Speaker Mike Johnson His Job
• Hern and Donalds both out as House GOP begins 5th round of voting
• What you need to know about the debt ceiling deal

Sixty-three members now make up the group after 12 Republicans joined this term. The 2015 showdown over Boehner’s leadership and the proposed government shutdown also caused California Rep. Tom McClintock and Wisconsin Rep. Reid Ribble to leave the caucus. The rise of Donald Trump within the Republican Party began to shift the caucus’s ideology. Initially, the Freedom Caucus was not uniformly supportive of Trump; his populist, less ideologically pure approach to conservatism was at odds with its more traditional conservative views. Yet, as Trump’s influence within the party grew, the Freedom Caucus began to align more closely with him.

During Trump administration

The group, which includes many veterans of the Tea Party movement, was formed in January with the declared aim of pushing the House GOP leadership rightward on certain fiscal and social issues. More broadly, the caucus wants power shifted away from the leadership to the rank-and-file (by, for instance, giving committees more leeway on which bills to move forward and allowing more amendments to come to floor votes). Unlike other congressional caucuses, the Freedom Caucus does not disclose an official member list, although 16 current members list their Freedom Caucus affiliations on their official House websites, and various unofficial lists have circulated. For those reasons, it can be hard to distinguish between representatives who belong to the caucus and those who work closely with it but aren’t full members. On Saturday the House of Representatives approved the most consequential legislation of this Congress, a foreign aid package for American allies. More Democrats than Republicans voted in favor of the measure that allowed the package to pass.

The caucus has wielded a lot of power in past fights.

As of January 2022, Ballotpedia had identified ten state legislatures with Republican caucuses modeled after the Freedom Caucus. State-level caucuses are not necessarily formally affiliated with the federal Freedom Caucus, but may share similarities in areas such as ideological positions and approaches to legislating. The Freedom Caucus members and allies have a median DW-NOMINATE score of +0.681, substantially higher than the median for all other House GOP members (+0.455). The least conservative Freedom Caucus-aligned member, in fact, is still more conservative than the median non-Freedom Caucus House Republican.

Political activity

The group had a meltdown last month after McCarthy successfully negotiated with Biden a deal to raise the debt ceiling, which passed with more Democratic than Republican votes and was seen by many as intolerably compromising. After the deal passed, hardliners staged a protest that consumed the House for days last month. While the Freedom Caucus had policy goals in mind, most of its work has focused on disrupting and altering the internal workings of the House. If it could wrest away some of the speaker’s power, the thinking went, more conservative legislation might have a better shot at passing. One early and consistent way the Freedom Caucus did this was by voting against House rules, slowing down the legislative process and making it harder for bills that the caucus wasn’t happy with to come up for a vote.

Both groups have targeted Gill, spending a combined $2.1 million against him in the 26th District race in North Texas to replace retiring GOP Rep. Michael Burgess. Gill’s father-in-law, Dinesh D’Souza, directed the election conspiracy theory documentary “2000 Mules” about the 2020 election. Conservatives for American Excellence, for instance, received $3 million from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin in January, according to FEC filings.

McCarthy had, through developing a relationship with far-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, sought to court that extreme wing of his party in order to avoid the pitfalls of the previous Republican speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. The Republican Study Committee remains the largest ideological group, with more than half of the House GOP conference claiming membership. With more than 170 members, the RSC reflects the most common conservative ideals of the Republican Party as it often has over its 50-year tenure.

Another Freedom Caucus member pushed out - Live Updates - POLITICO - POLITICO

Another Freedom Caucus member pushed out - Live Updates - POLITICO.

Posted: Mon, 11 Mar 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Hern and Donalds both out as House GOP begins 5th round of voting

The situation has only grown worse after Johnson made clear he would allow the House to vote on additional US aid to Ukraine. According to Politico, this group will make sure that no other Republicans try to rush through changes that would make it harder for lawmakers to oust Johnson from power or that would strip three Freedom Caucus members of a powerful perch they all hold. The publication reported that the Freedom Caucus does not expect any such maneuvers but is remaining vigilant just in case any of their colleagues try to be silent but deadly to their cause.

What you need to know about the debt ceiling deal

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida has identified himself as an “admirer” of the group. House of Representatives made up of the most conservative wing of the Republican Party’s congressional members. The caucus, an outgrowth of the 2009 Tea Party movement, represents a shift toward more ideologically driven and less compromise-oriented politics within Congress.

Public Policy

But the friendship degenerated as Greene and McCarthy began to form a mutually beneficial alliance over the past year. In March 2022, Politico reported, Greene and Boebert got in a screaming match at a Freedom Caucus board meeting, with Greene indignant that Boebert had not defended her for appearing at a conference sponsored by the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. The two also reportedly differed over Greene’s opposition to funding for Ukraine. Clyde has previously said on provocateur Steve Bannon's controversial podcast that House leadership threatened to block his bill on pistol braces if he voted against advancing the debt ceiling legislation.

“No matter what we come out of here with, we’re going to sit down and negotiate with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president. In the 2010 midterms, during former President Barack Obama’s first term, a Republican wave elected scores of conservative lawmakers to Congress, giving the party six more seats in the Senate and flipping the House. At that time, there was already a conservative caucus within the House, the Republican Study Committee, and many newly elected Republicans joined.

Though the rabble-rousing right-wing group has a chairman, holds meetings, issues statements, and takes positions, it has no public membership roster or bylaws, and its proceedings are seldom publicly disclosed. Yet nothing had been announced, and the controversial Georgia congresswoman insisted nothing had been conveyed to her. The long-simmering feud between Greene and a fellow Freedom Caucus stalwart, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, had recently erupted into public name-calling, with Greene calling Boebert a “little b–ch“ on the House floor. But despite the vitriol, conservative members have shied away from moving on a motion to vacate, a rule McCarthy agreed to in January in his fight for the speakership.

AOA is a group of GOP donors led in part by longtime GOP financier Paul Singer. While Griffin was reportedly at the retreat, his donation to the super PAC arrived before the group made its presentation to donors at the gathering, according to FEC records. And more battles like this could continue throughout the next six months of congressional primaries across the country. In Alabama, Moore has the backing of the House Freedom Fund in his race against fellow GOP Rep. Jerry Carl, after they were drawn into the same district as part of court-mandated redistricting in the state. Most of the eight Republicans who moved to oust then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year were Freedom Caucus members, and members of the group have opposed deals struck by new Speaker Mike Johnson in attempts to keep the government open this year.

Comparatively, fewer than two-thirds of House Republican incumbents were objectors. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows and Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry are the co-chairs of the House Freedom Caucus, which currently has about 32 members, according to the Washington Post. Members of the House Freedom Caucus are among the most ideologically conservative House Republicans, as Pew Research Center found in an analysis of 36 confirmed Freedom Caucus members in 2015. The House Freedom Caucus was founded in January 2015 by nine Republicans as an invite-only group with the goal of lobbying for more conservative legislation. “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast. Ballotpedia features 486,966 encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers.

In January 2021, the Freedom Caucus was almost unanimous in opposing the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory over former President Donald Trump. Of the 40 current Freedom Caucus members and allies who were serving at that time, 38 supported at least one objection to counting Biden’s electoral votes. A smaller share of all other House Republicans seated at the time (about 60%) did so.