From the moment they formed in early 2015, the far-right House Freedom Caucus has been a pest, but one to be reckoned with on Capitol Hill. Any time government funding was in jeopardy, or a fiscal cliff loomed, or a Republican party boss made a bid for the worst job in Washington—speaker of the House—the Freedom Caucus was there, extracting concessions like mob enforcers taking in payments for protection. They and their comrades have driven multiple speakers into early retirement; one speaker who crossed them was summarily pushed out of his job. During the 118th Congress, the House Freedom Caucus raged at every show of bipartisanship, including votes to raise the debt ceiling and avoid government shutdowns. Rather than be treated by pariahs, caucus members were elevated. Former HFC staffers can now be found working throughout federal agencies.1

The 119th Congress has been an utterly different story. The junkyard dogs of the HFC have turned into lapdogs for President Donald Trump. Every act of defiance and belligerence they’ve summoned—from making impotent threats to tanking ceremonial rule votes—has accomplished nothing.

Respect for them on the Hill is rapidly diminishing. HFC colleagues who were once cowed by the group have learned to toss their policy demands aside. The first large-scale legislative achievement in the second Trump presidency—an inequitable tax- and program-slashing budget, now set to explode the deficit and inflict pain on their poorest constituents—passed with their overwhelming support. Despite making their standard angry protestations about the contents of the bill, caucus members all fell in line. They have not returned to form since. Recently, a cryptocurrency bill elicited a 10-hour protest from HFC members; it ended after the holdouts accepted a minor concession.

HFC members left Washington last week for the summer recess with their tails between their legs; most were terrified to speak up about President Trump’s attempts to quash public interest in the crimes and suicide of Jeffrey Epstein—a longstanding preoccupation of the caucus. Trump even called his supporters who still maintain an interest in Epstein gullible “weaklings” who “have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker.” None snapped back.

The resolution demanding the government release the Epstein files has eleven Republican co-sponsors, but only four are members of the Freedom Caucus.2

“The Freedom Caucus is gonna fight for more conservative bills,” said Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) when asked how the group will approach the upcoming showdown over funding. “We’re gonna use everything we have. We’ve steered—the Freedom Caucus is what drove a lot of the reductions in a lot of the recissions package in the 9.4 billion [dollars] in cuts we had.”

Despite Norman’s assertive language, recent history suggests that when government funding runs out at the end of September, we are likely to see a familiar pattern—one where the caucus’s arch-conservatives bay for blood only until the president brings them to heel with insults and a bit of cajoling.

Their current position is still up in the air, but according to HFC Chairman Andy Harris (R-Md.), one option is full-year continuing resolution.

“I think we ought to start planning for a full-year CR,” Harris told reporters. “A funding freeze in a setting of 2.7 percent inflation actually is a real cut in the size of the scope of government.”

Other Freedom Caucus members are all over the place. They have a history of claiming to dislike CRs, but they have not consistently opposed them en masse. (If you want to test my domesticated-attack-dog theory, make a note of Harris’s year-long CR position and keep track of both whether it changes over the next two months, and whether the HFC extracts any meaningful concessions because of it.)

Factions within a political party are typically deferential to a newly-elected president who comes from within the party ranks. This gives today’s HFC a simple justification for their ineffectiveness: They’re giving Trump some runway.

But they’re not giving Trump runway—he’s simply taking it, and embarrassing them in the process. That’s because the current HFC posture is also directly at odds with the caucus’s founding principles—in fact, it contradicts the idea that the caucus would be driven by principle at all. The HFC’s new impotence represents a major development in the internal politics of the House, with consequences that go beyond the shaping of big votes. The HFC’s defanging now means their colleagues have little reason to defer to them, let alone continue to give them important committee posts.

Various Freedom Caucus members have been getting passed over for important roles, such as the coveted chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. That position went to a mild-mannered Problem Solvers Caucus member, Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.),3 who won out over Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), a Freedom Caucuser known by the nickname, “Cajun John Wayne.”

The HFC’s signature move—throwing an angry fit without having any follow-through to secure their demands—has become a joke on Capitol Hill, even earning them a nickname among reporters and other lawmakers: the House Folding Caucus.

Lately, it seems some Freedom Caucus members have seen where their ship is headed, and following the rough start of the new Congress, quite a few of them are heading for the exits. Despite the Freedom Caucus comprising less than 15 percent of the House Republican Conference, almost half of the House Republicans who are choosing to leave the chamber and run for another office this cycle are HFC members.

Those members are:

• Ralph Norman, running for governor of South Carolina.

• Mike Collins, running for Georgia’s Senate seat.

• Byron Donalds, running for governor of Florida.

• Andy Biggs, running for governor of Arizona.

More departing HFCers might still be getting their parachutes on to jump out of the chamber. In the meantime, expect the Freedom Caucus to get on board with whatever Trump demands of them. It’s not just me saying that—as Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) recently put it, “At the end of the day, our goals are aligned nearly perfectly with the president.”

Share

Elect me to lead, not to read

Speaking of Freedom Caucusers who want a new job, Rep. Collins announced his Georgia Senate bid on Monday. If he wins the Republican primary, he will face incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff in 2026. Unfortunately, Collins’s video announcing his candidacy misspelled “Georgia.”

A seasoned campaign operative mused to me that Collins’s misspelling could have been deliberate; as they explained over text, the theory is that a mistake as obvious and boneheaded as that would make the video much likelier to go viral online. And given the way that intelligence—especially the kind demonstrated in fastidiousness about spelling and grammer—is often coded as classist or elitist, perhaps Collins’s team is betting that Real Americans™ won’t care about the slip and might even get annoyed at anyone who does.

It’s an elegant theory, but I’m not sure I find it convincing. Playing political chess at that level is extraordinarily rare. You know what isn’t? Good, old-fashioned incompetence.

Leave a comment

It’s just been revoked

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) has quickly made a name for herself on Capitol Hill. As an outspoken member of the House Oversight Committee with a knack for creative (and sometimes, not too creative) insults,4 she’s gone viral on multiple occasions and shown she isn’t afraid of attacks from Republicans.

But in a new profile, Crockett demonstrated a poor grasp of media dynamics when she attempted to corral the reporter after that reporter called the freshman lawmaker’s House colleagues to get their perspectives on what she is like to work with on Capitol Hill.

The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey writes:

Crockett said that people are free to disagree with her communication style, but that she “was elected to speak up for the people that I represent.” As for her colleagues, four days before this story was published, Crockett called me to express frustration that I had reached out to so many House members without telling her first. She was, she told me, “shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions.”

That’s not how any of this works. Don’t be surprised if you consent to a profile and the reporter reaches out to others to, you know, profile you. After all, you might think you have the clearest view of yourself and what you’re about, but an eye can’t see itself.

Crockett’s attempt to shut her profiler down is just a small piece of an illuminating profile. Read the whole thing.