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The sustainability of it all will be decided by whether Mr. Johnson continues down a path of realistic policymaking or feels the urge to now appease the discontents who have worked to stymie him from the start. 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.
Membership
The exact composition of the House Freedom Caucus in the next Congress is also not yet clear as some races have yet to be decided. Representative Lauren Boebert, a prominent member, is locked in a tight race in Colorado's 3rd district against Democrat Adam Frisch. Those eight years actually made Hastert the longest-serving Republican speaker in history. But any luster left after 2006 was lost when he went to prison for bank fraud charges stemming from hush money payments he had made to a former student he admitted to having sexually abused decades earlier. "Fighting another day means you look at appropriations, look at reallocations on the military budget, look at the farm bill," he said.
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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. One is Tom McClintock, a California Republican who has long been a hero of fiscal conservatives.
Mike Johnson (LA-
Their hope is that this will push the House further to the right, but it could easily wind up giving more influence to House Democrats instead. The Trump Administration is the first time the House Freedom Caucus has had to make decisions on legislation under a Republican president. The HFC does not publish a public list of its members, but at least 52 members of congress have either self-identified or have been identified by colleagues as HFC members as of January 3, 2023 (the start of the 118th Congress). If the situation seems odd, it was par for the course for the Freedom Caucus, Congress’s most enigmatic organization. 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.
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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. "There was an agreement in January and it was violated in the debt ceiling bill," said Buck, a member of the caucus who tanked the Tuesday vote that brought the floor to a standstill.
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But so did many of the more moderate members, according to former Rep. John Fleming, one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus. To quantify this, we used a dataset called DW-NOMINATE, first developed by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal in the early 1980s and refined and updated since. In simplified form, DW-NOMINATE assigns each representative a score ranging from -1 (most liberal) to +1 (most conservative) based on roll-call votes. The analysis also used a dataset called DW-NOMINATE to compare the ideologies of Freedom Caucus members and allies with those of other House Republicans in the 118th Congress.
Rep. Dan Bishop spoke alongside members of the Freedom Caucus to announce they would oppose the deal to raise the debt limit on May 30. "I knew from day one with a small majority of people have strong opinions, with people who are bright, articulate, people who understand how to use the media as well — I will listen to them," McCarthy said. A flurry of meetings followed the stunning floor rebellion, with House Freedom Caucus members and leadership meeting Tuesday evening through Wednesday. By Wednesday, Perry and Greene still had not personally spoken about the issue, even though they would have been on the House floor together during votes. And in Texas’ 12th District, the group has spent nearly $600,000 to bolster Texas state Rep. Craig Goldman against businessman John O’Shea in the race to replace retiring GOP Rep. Kay Granger.
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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. Greene has continued to support McCarthy as the Freedom Caucus has struggled to define its purpose with Republicans in the majority.
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McCarthy also agreed to a passel of rule changes long sought by the Freedom Caucus, many of them intended to shift power away from the speaker’s office and toward committee chairs and rank-and-file members. The list of the 10 speakers who served in the job longest includes just one Republican (and in the ninth slot at that). That speaker was Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois, notorious as the autocratic "Czar Cannon" during three two-year tours as speaker that ended with his party's historic defeat in 1910.
He quit the House Freedom Caucus in September, arguing that it had proven counterproductive. 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. Fourteen of the 15 incumbents who voted against Mr. McCarthy were among the 139 House Republicans who, on Jan. 6, 2021, voted to overturn the 2020 Electoral College results.
Is it primarily to oppose McCarthy and Republican leadership, as it has historically done? Or should the group recast itself as team players while Republicans stake out their opposition to President Biden and the Democrats? 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. The following year, after Republicans picked up sixty-three House seats in the midterms, an insurgent wing of the G.O.P. refused to raise the debt ceiling, in order to pressure the Obama Administration to cut the federal budget.
O’Shea told the Texas Tribune he would consider joining the Freedom Caucus if elected. 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.
Mr. Jordan, who himself voted for Mr. McCarthy, is a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and has repeatedly cast doubt on the 2020 election. Nearly all of the lawmakers who voted against Mr. McCarthy made statements casting doubt on the 2020 election, often repeatedly, not unlike the overall Republican caucus. At least 180 of the 222 House Republicans have questioned the 2020 election, according to The Times’s analysis. More than half of the lawmakers who voted against Mr. McCarthy explicitly denied the results of the 2020 election, compared with about 15 percent of the 222 total members in the Republican caucus, according to a New York Times analysis. These Republicans said that the election had been stolen or rigged — or that Donald J. Trump was the rightful winner — even though Joe Biden earned seven million more votes and 74 more electors than Mr. Trump.
To win the Republican nomination for Speaker today, McCarthy needed 124 Republican votes—a majority within his party. To be elected by the full House at the end of October, however, he would have needed 218 votes—a majority of the full chamber, and votes that traditionally come only from fellow majority party members. 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.
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