Freedom Caucus Conservative Republican Group, Tactics, Donald Trump, & Kevin McCarthy
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According to analysis from the Pew Research Center, the Freedom Caucus was almost unanimous in opposing the January 2021 certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Of the 40 members identified as Freedom Caucus members or its strong allies, 38 objected at least once to the counting of electoral votes for Biden. Established in January 2015, the Freedom Caucus is known for its staunch right-wing positions on fiscal and social matters, including government spending, immigration, and LGBTQ rights.
Betting on Trump to fail has made his stock shorters millions
Rep. Bob Good, DeSantis backer, elected new Freedom Caucus chair - NBC News
Rep. Bob Good, DeSantis backer, elected new Freedom Caucus chair.
Posted: Tue, 12 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
But many caucus members felt bruised by Greene’s bullying tactics, including the way she seemed to weaponize her access to Trump. At one point, she extended her iPhone to caucus member Matt Rosendale, who waved it away; the screen, clearly visible to photographers, showed it was Trump calling. The Trump snub has reportedly become a political problem for Rosendale, who is considering a Senate run in his home state of Montana. On the morning of May 26th, a Friday, McCarthy was signalling that a deal was near. “They’re going in a direction that won’t endure,” Vought told me. “McCarthy is going to test the conservatives.” He predicted some “rockiness” ahead for the Speaker.
A Wild Day in the House Could Cost Speaker Mike Johnson His Job
The Greene controversy illustrates the group’s struggle to define itself with Trump out of office. Greene quickly allied herself with the rabble-rousing caucus when she got to Washington in 2021. She, Gaetz, and Boebert were especially tight, forming the core of a “MAGA Squad” of pro-Trump ultraconservatives. But the friendship degenerated as Greene and McCarthy began to form a mutually beneficial alliance over the past year.
How the funding finally passed
Data on which members voted to object to the certification of President Biden’s Electoral College win in January 2021 comes from The Washington Post.
House Freedom Caucus squeezes Mike Johnson on Baltimore bridge funding - Axios
House Freedom Caucus squeezes Mike Johnson on Baltimore bridge funding.
Posted: Fri, 05 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
But still we must wonder how long a G.O.P. speaker can sustain a position he owes to Democrats. 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. The hedge fund executive has been a major backer of Nikki Haley’s super PAC in the presidential race, giving $5 million to that group. Griffin has also been a big donor to Congressional Leadership Fund, the main House GOP-aligned super PAC, in recent years, giving $27 million in the last election cycle.
McCarthy proved he’s a stronger House speaker than many expected. But GOP is split over cutting government
He was almost certain to meet the first threshold, but could lose the support of only 29 Republicans to meet the second. Without the support of some of the HFC members, then, McCarthy would have been unable to get to that 218 mark. 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. Conservatives' tensions with Johnson have surged since the $1.2 trillion government funding bill to avert a partial shutdown.
Because Republican leaders can afford to lose the support of only four members on any House vote, the dozen or so far-right lawmakers are able to disrupt the chamber at any time. Lawmakers must pass a government funding bill by the end of September to avoid a government shutdown, and Freedom Caucus members are gearing up to use that negotiation as leverage to further slash spending. Gaetz, the ringleader of the ousting of McCarthy, said Thursday he wouldn’t support a motion to vacate and said, “If we vacated this speaker, we’d end up with a Democrat,” also suggesting some Republicans would vote for Jeffries for speaker. One of the few things conservatives could do was tank procedural rule votes on the House floor and freeze the lower chamber as a way to express their anger at leadership, but that can only been effective for so long. After Republicans won the House in November, McCarthy struggled to win the speakership, with Gaetz and many Freedom Caucus members withholding their votes over the course of a messy series of 15 floor votes.
They were unhappy this spring with his deal with Biden to avoid hitting the debt ceiling, saying it didn’t go far enough — then grew furious when he relied on Democratic votes to overcome their objections. 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). There was nothing in the package of foreign policy bills that the House passed last weekend that addressed the border. The Freedom Caucus likes to believe that Republicans had enough leverage on Ukraine that they would ultimately get Democrats to swallow conservatives’ very strict border bill, H.R. 2—a demand that calls into question how many of them have ever spoken to a Democrat.
WASHINGTON – When Republicans took control of the House last year with almost the thinnest of majorities, all eyes turned to the House Freedom Caucus. The loose group of 30-some ultraconservative lawmakers outnumbered the narrow vote margin for Republicans and, as a result, were granted new outsized leverage over leadership to cater to their whims. 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. Republican moderates ultimately backed the budget bill, knowing that there was no chance it could survive the Democratic Senate. The likeliest outcome of talks between Biden and McCarthy looked like a compromise that could earn a majority of Democrats and Republicans, if not a majority of Republicans.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and former Freedom Caucus member, filed a motion to potentially remove Johnson from power in response to the funding bill. The situation has only grown worse after Johnson made clear he would allow the House to vote on additional US aid to Ukraine. House Freedom Caucus chair Bob Good, R-Va., told reporters on Friday that although he doesn't defend Johnson's performance as speaker, he thinks it's not in the interest of the Republican Party to go through another speakership fight six months before an election. Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., spoke to reporters on Capitol Hill following a foreign aid bill vote on April 19. Each portion of the package — which was broken down into separate bills — received bipartisan support. A majority of Republican members — 112 — voted against aid to Ukraine, with one member voting "present." Thirty-seven Democrats voted against aid to Israel.
Roy credited McCarthy for listening more closely to his group after their post-debt-ceiling show of force. They responded by withholding their support for GOP bills for more than a week, grinding the House to a halt in a warning to McCarthy. In 2013, when Roy was chief of staff to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), he helped persuade House Republicans to force a 17-day shutdown in an attempt to repeal Obamacare. “We’re working hard — harder, in my opinion, than we should have to work, but everything’s hard in this Congress,” he said ruefully. The hard-right House Freedom Caucus’ latest revolt against McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) was over the National Defense Authorization Act, the law that authorizes the annual spending for the U.S. military. If Congress fails to pass the spending bills into law by Jan. 1, it raises the possibility of an across-the-board 1% reduction in spending for the year that would kick in at the end of April.
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 House Freedom Fund—the campaign arm of the Freedom Caucus—endorsed several candidates who have now been elected and may be expected to join the group.
Five months after his epic rant, Roy and his chums have the same amount to celebrate—basically nothing—and a lot more to complain about. The House finally passed into law government-funding bills for the rest of the fiscal year at levels far too high for the hard-liners’ taste. It also finally pushed through security assistance for Ukraine without any border security reforms or changes attached, and without any corresponding spending cuts.
But the hard-liners have not merely been idle bystanders, whining aimlessly as they get outvoted. Their insistence on maximalist wins—rather than incremental gains proportional to their junior-partner stake in running the country—lessened conservative achievements by throwing Republican leaders into the arms of Democrats in order to pass necessary items. Conservatives for American Excellence has spent $642,000 against Moore so far, per FEC filings. The group has also tried to appeal to pro-Trump voters, with one ad featuring a Trump supporter who says Moore “voted against finishing Trump’s wall,” citing Moore’s vote against a sweeping government funding measure last year. But their power to cause chaos has grown this year due to the House GOP’sthin majority.
In the past year, the House has averted a catastrophic debt default, passed foreign military aid when it seemed hopeless and funded the government when a shutdown seemed all but inevitable. But the critical items are getting done in a more bipartisan manner than would seem possible in this era of negative partisanship. At the time, House GOP leaders hoped that rank-and-file Republicans would feel the pain and never want to shut down the government again.
On the other hand, “they underestimated the hatred they have earned,” for their unruliness, the GOP lawmaker said. Aggravated over former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., leading a bipartisan deal to temporarily avert a shutdown last year, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., along with seven other conservative rebels and all House Democrats, ousted McCarthy from the speakership. It resulted in a chaotic speaker election that saw Johnson ascend to the top job. Little illustrates that dynamic better than a meeting between the speaker and his right flank in January. In response, Johnson has been forced to opt for a procedural tactic called suspension to muscle legislation to the floor with little debate.
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