What's next for the Freedom Caucus?

The House Freedom Caucus was formed to push the Republican Party to the right, but a lot of its members are leaving Congress. What happens next to the movement, to Republicans overall, and what happens when they leave? And when Donald Trump does too, let's get into it. It's the NPR Politics Podcast, I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Eric McDaniel. I cover Congress. And I'm Danielle Kertzleben. I cover the White House. All right, Eric. I want to start, though, before we get into what is coming up in the midterms with these folks, what is the Freedom Caucus? Like, when did they come into Congress? Like, who are these people? So get in your hot tub time machines. We're going back to 2015. And I talked to Freedom Caucus co-founders about how one big frustration was that Congress wasn't working for rank and file membership. They said, you basically show up. You turn over your voting card to party leaders and hope that eventually you get a plum committee leadership position if you stick around long enough. So they founded the Freedom Caucus. The idea was that individual members could have more control over the process. In this case, conservatives, they wanted less cooperation with the Obama White House, a regular open process for budget bills, and just generally more influence for social and fiscal conservatives. Okay. So you mentioned the Obama administration here. I mean, are we talking about the Tea Party? Is this like a different thing? Is this like an offshoot of that? A lot of ideological overlap, but I would say, you know, it kind of evolved from that Tea Party moment into the Freedom Caucus itself. And it's continued to evolve since then, just like the rest of the party, right? So when Trump came into power in 2016, sworn in in 2017, it was hard for them to stick to their principles of, say, limiting executive branch power when the president is kind of doing things you want. One of these co-founders I talked to was a guy named John Fleming. He's a former congressman from Louisiana. He's now state treasurer there. And he founded the caucus with several others during his time in Congress. And he said that the Freedom Caucus was MAGA before MAGA. They were socially conservative. They were rabble rousing. They were willing to disrupt the status quo. And it's worth noting that like many other Freedom Caucus members, Fleming went on to serve in the Trump administration. He was deputy chief of staff, other founders, Mark Meadows and Mick Mulvaney both served as chief of staff to Trump during the first term. And many of his biggest allies in Congress to this day have been Freedom Caucus members. I'd point to Florida's Byron Donalds. There is so much in that quote about saying that the Freedom Caucus was MAGA before MAGA was cool. I mean, it really gets that this question of, wait, hold up, hold up. What do you think MAGA is? Now, there's an important hair to split here, which is that if he's saying that the Freedom Caucus was pushing back against the GOP establishment before Trump came onto the scene, sure, totally. But MAGA isn't always has been Trump, right? So which really I think gets at the crux of what Eric is getting at in his very good story on this, which is that the Freedom Caucus formed when the GOP wasn't in the White House. And it's had, it's correct me if I'm wrong, Eric, but it's biggest moments like pushing out or helping push out to Republican speakers when the GOP hasn't been in the White House. So all of this points to the big questions that are looming over the Freedom Caucus right now, which is once Trump, who is MAGA, is gone and is out of the White House, whether it's a Republican or Democrat in the White House next, then what is the Freedom Caucus? And is it most itself when it's pushing back against someone, as opposed to just going along with someone like the Freedom Caucus has often gone along with Trump? No, push back for me, Ashley. I think Daniel has it just right. Yeah. You said that they've had to make peace with some aspects of Trumpism, but yeah, obviously there's some overlap, but you know, first what comes to mind is like, I can imagine these were always the deficit hawks, right? In Congress, like they have had to probably just sort of like shut their mouths on a lot of this stuff. I mean, what do you see as being the big schisms of stuff they've had to make peace with when we're talking about the Freedom Caucus and Trump? I think that's right. I mean, Daniel and I both tracked the budget deficit expanding aspects of Trump's signature domestic policy legislation, the one big beautiful bill. Some caucus members were really unsure about that and pushed back in public on the Trump administration, though, like on many things with Trump, they ultimately fell in line. Not everyone involved in the Freedom Caucus, though, wanted to leave their kind of small government congressional control executive branch oversight identity behind their kind of watchdog reputation. Matt Salmon is another founder of former congressman from Arizona. I think they morphed from being the entity that really was about getting back to regular order to becoming the chief cheery and squad for Trump, and I couldn't be more disappointed. And just like to what Danielle was alluding to, they've evolved a lot since those founding days to be Trump allies and caving on things like deficit and the question becomes, where do they go in this next Congress and where do they go after Trump is term limited and out of the White House? And all of this also is kind of a mirror to what's going on over at the White House and what and who Trump is politically, because to the degree that you think the House Freedom Caucus was formed around a particular ideology in the first place. And then Trump came into the White House, and then they had to decide how much to follow Trump. Well, Trump does not have a central guiding political or economic philosophy or ideology. I mean, this is stuff that I've reported on just looking at economically. Yeah, he does some old school Republican stuff like deregulation, but his government has also taken equity stakes in companies. They do a lot of tariffs. They spend a lot, lot, all of which is not exactly economically conservative. So I think that that is really so much the crux of what we're talking about here is how much Trump is a quote unquote conservative and how much the people in the Freedom Caucus want to be that as well versus following Trump. Yeah. I mean, an Eric, I mean, that makes me wonder what Matt Samin is saying when he says regular order. I mean, is it what Daniel is describing here like more like back to the basics on the economic side? Yeah. I mean, in fact, I talked to one of the departing members representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina. He unsuccessfully ran into different Senate primaries for governor and for South Carolina Senator to replace the Lake Lindsey Graham. He lost both of those, but he has been a very visible kind of press stalwart and advocate for the Freedom Caucus and its views. And he kind of thinks that in the next Congress, they're going to go back to basics. They say the Freedom Caucus has an issue on things we always should have been caring about. I'm paraphrasing, but he brought up the budget deficit specifically Matt Samin, the co-founder who feels like they've become cheerleaders for Trump. He also says I'd like to see them focus on the budget deficit, John Fleming, a man who was proud of being mega before mega in the Freedom Caucus, also called out the budget deficit. And one of the things Fleming said is whoever the next president is, they're going to be more status quo than the kind of maverick Donald Trump that we have, right? They're going to be more business as usual. And he said he thinks that's a great time for the Freedom Caucus to exercise ideological leadership, basically. I mean, Daniel, have you observed any parting of ways with Trump and then Freedom Caucus? I mean, like right now as we're getting closer to the midterms, you are seeing candidates sort of split. I don't know if that has been true also with particular the members of this group. You know, it's fascinating because had you asked me knee-jerk, I would have said, "Oh, yeah, they've parted ways with him. They've made a lot of noise about that." Yeah, true. They have parted ways with him sometimes. This is a group that during this term has definitely made it share of news, has sometimes created headaches within the broader Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, but has not really posed huge problems for the White House. I mean, the Freedom Caucus has also been pretty remarkably lined up behind Trump. I ran across one statistic of the Pew Research Center, ran the numbers on this just after January 6th, and found that, and I'm going to quote here, "Of the 40th then-current, Freedom Caucus members and allies who were serving at the time, 38 supported at least one objection to counting Biden's electoral votes, 38 out of 40. That's a lot. Comparatively, other House Republicans, 60% of them raised or supported at least one objection. So, this is a group of people that really lined up right behind Trump even at that moment of January 6th." Here, I think, is the lesson, Ashley, right? We saw them come onto the scene as one thing, kind of small government, socially conservative folks who were concerned about congressional powers and executive branch oversight. We saw them evolve into what Matt Samen described as two leaders for the White House, and what John Fleming said was primary supporters of the president's agenda. And the question is, now that Trump's power is waning, where do they go next? And I think that journey, what watching from here will tell us a lot about what that holds for the Republican Party after Trump leaves office. Okay. And I do want to talk about where some of them are actually leaving next, but more of that in a moment, let's take a quick break. Welcome back. And, Eric, we had mentioned that some of these members of the Freedom Caucus are leaving. Where are they going? So, there are at least seven-ish folks who are headed for the exit of about 25 Freedom Caucus members. Their membership isn't officially listed publicly, although it's pretty well known. either still or have unsuccessfully sought other offices outside of Congress. So turnover shouldn't be a surprise, right? I don't think people should see this as the Freedom Caucus is, you know, unsuccessful or, you know, dissolving. It's mostly that these folks are seeking higher office, including close allies of the president. By Randall's of Florida is seeking that state's governorship. The Biggs is running for governor in Arizona, Thomas Tiffany in Wisconsin. All of them have the presidents backing Representative Chip Roy of Texas ran in the Republican primary for Lieutenant Governor. He was unsuccessful. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, he's the one member who did lose his primary. Ogles has repeatedly expressed Islamophobic views that other members of the Republican Party have felt were objectionable. Many of the folks I've took to welcome to the fact that he lost his primary and would not be coming back to Congress next year. Many of his colleagues felt this, though his particular brand of rabble rousing was occasionally a distraction for what the caucus wanted to do. I am curious, though, Danielle. Like, you know, it is very likely that Democrats will be winning a majority in the House. And I wonder if this could be a reset for this group, which was always kind of like most powerful or most influential when it's an oppositional force. I mean, is that likely to happen here? Is that what you see then sort of next step of the freedom caucus going? Like you said, and like I said earlier, this is a group that has had its biggest moments when it is pushing back against the people in power, pushing back against the establishment, whether it is their own party's establishment or Democrats, when they are in power. And this whole story that we're talking about here is, of course, a microcosm for the Republican party. Whatever schisms we see in the freedom caucus, whatever jostling for position, whatever ideological or personality clashes they might have with the president, I mean, the whole party is having that right now. I think the thing that we're going to keep coming back to over and over as we seem to be here with this freedom caucus story is this, is that this is a party that has been since 2015, you know, maybe with a few gaps has been led by a personality. And so when that personality is no longer legally allowed to serve in the presidency, that is a massive vacuum. And it is entirely unpredictable what happens next. I think both with the freedom caucus and also with the party at large. Okay, Danielle, I want to turn to a moment for some other news. The White House introduced a new package of resisions over the weekend. First, remind everyone what those are and what's on the chopping block this time. So a rescission is where the White House says it doesn't want to spend money that Congress has allocated for a certain program or policy late on Friday after a lot of people were done with their work days. The White House put out this notice that they were doing resisions of somewhere north of $800 million. Just at the 30,000 foot view, actually, the White House says that 567 million of this comes from programs that provide services to immigrants to the United States, particularly refugees, Asylis and other non-citizens. And then there are some buckets in the tens of millions of dollars aimed at racial or sexual minority groups or doing things like combat and climate change. What's the rationale here? Is it like anti-DII stuff that the White House has had kind of a being it's bonded about or has there as some other explanation been given? The White House has put all of this under the umbrella of things that are wasteful and harmful, but especially to this administration that can mean any number of things. So yeah, there are a lot of political motivations at work here. For example, in the notice the White House put out, they talk about, yeah, that these groups are practicing DEI or they're favoring one racial or ethnic group over another. There are also downright personal motivations that the White House gets at here. For example, saying that some of these organizations are run by former Obama White House officials or by people connected to the Obama's. So the White House is not making a secret also of, yeah, this isn't purely ideological. We are pushing back against groups connected to specifically a Democratic president. We don't like. One other thing though to zoom out and again take the 30,000-foot view is just under a billion dollars. In the grand scheme of things, of course, that is not a lot. That is a tiny drop in the bucket of U.S. government spending. Discretionary congressional appropriations each year are something to the tune of a trillion dollars non-defense spending and a trillion dollars defense spending, so a billion, not a lot. Yeah. None of this is to say that these recessions don't matter. Of course, they matter if you are an affected organization or constituent. Those numbers are an indicator that this isn't necessarily a White House trying to rein in deficits. This is a White House trying to make very specific political points while it's pulling back the spending. From my beat, though, Ashley, this is just massively, massively important. Congress's chief authority is the power of the purse. Lawmakers get to decide how your tax dollars are spent. That is, at core, their primary function. For the White House to ignore bipartisan funding bills was described to me by Josh Chaffetz, a constitutional scholar at Georgetown University, as not just unconstitutional, but anti-constitutional. He means an attack at the core of what the legislative branch is supposed to be doing. The government accountability office, this is a congressional agency, an independent non-partisan watchdog that is supposed to inform federal agencies and lawmakers about what they can or can't do, says expressly, pocket rescissions are illegal. They don't mince words. They don't play around. The White House is supposed to notify Congress within 45 days if they're going to do this. A pocket rescission, what President Trump has done here is just wait until the fiscal year is about to end, which ends at the end of September, and said, "We're taking this money back." He wasn't leaving Congress with any time to respond and say, "Actually, that's our call to make," right? He did this last year, too. It was eventually litigated by Congress, but this is a problem in terms of America's constitutional order, right? This is maybe just a billion dollars, but it's also a re-litigation of what are some of the assumed bedrock structures of how the American government functions. I mean, last time, there were members of Congress who did express that they were mad about this. But if you're acting, you'd get more of a pushback this time, or, I don't know, what are you hearing? Folks are mad, right? Including at least one Republican, top GOP Senate appropriator Susan Collins of Maine, says the White House does not get to decide which programs are worth funding. Her colleague, Paddy Murray of Washington, says this is theft from the American people, right? It's just the latest example, too, of how Trump has abrogated congressional powers, right? He's conducted military operations in Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, the Caribbean, the Pacific, all without congressional authorization, as required by the Constitution. And according to Chaffetz, right, the power of the purse undergirds, all of the other powers. In the past, when Congress has been upset with the military conflict that the president is not heating their wishes to stop, they just defund the conflict, right? And so if the president starts to ignore or continues to ignore what Congress says we should be doing with money, that cuts at their ability to do something like regulate military conflicts in the future. Just leave it there for today. Come back tomorrow for more. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Eric McDaniel. I cover Congress. And I'm Daniel Kurtzleben. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics podcast.