The Freedom Caucus was always going to implode

Predictable.

(Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene)

The House Freedom Caucus appears to be on the verge of blowing up.

This, from CNN, gets at it:

Side sessions and private discussions among a small bloc of rebellious lawmakers have become more common and even necessary, some members say, after months of internal disagreements over tactics, policies and allegiances to their party’s leadership have fomented distrust within the group’s ranks.

The recent cracks that have emerged within the caucus – a band of roughly 40 rabble-rousers who derive much of their power from being unified against Republican leadership – are emblematic of a broader identity crisis that the eight-year-old group has been wrestling with. Initially formed to help pull the GOP legislative agenda to the right, the ultra conservative caucus quickly became a fanclub for Donald Trump, more defined by personalities than a devotion to policy.

Whoa boy.

While this is terrific reporting, it’s also unsurprising. Because the Freedom Caucus has been — especially in recent years — really just an amalgam of personalities only loosely guided by anything other than a) resistance to Republican leadership and b) a desire to be in the news.

It wasn’t always this way.

The group was formed in January 2015 in angry response to the Speakership of John Boehner.

“That was the first time we got together and decided we were a group, and not just a bunch of pissed-off guys,” Mick Mulvaney, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus who went on to be chief of staff for President Donald Trump, told the New Yorker.

The goal was to start a rump group of conservatives unhappy with party leaders. One of the founding tenets of the Freedom Caucus was that members had to be willing to vote against legislation Boehner championed.

In its earliest days, there was, generally speaking, an ideological element to the group. This 2015 Pew chart shows that the median Freedom Caucus member was markedly more conservative — in terms of voting record — than the median Republican member of the House.

And the typical Freedom Caucus member back then was a sort of egghead — a policy wonk who wanted the party to adopt far more conservative principles.

They tended to move and vote as a bloc — helping to drive Boehner from the Speakership in the fall of 2015. They were effective, in their way.

Even as the Freedom Caucus was exerting its power, the beginnings of its inevitable implosion could be seen in the rise of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy.

Trump’s election — and subsequent presidency — heralded a sea change in the Freedom Caucus’ most prominent faces. Gone were the likes of Mulvaney and in his place was the brash and unapologetically pro-Trump Matt Gaetz of Florida. (Gaetz, like Trump, was elected in 2016.)

Suddenly the House Freedom Caucus transformed from, ostensibly, a group of like-minded conservatives into a group of Trump defenders. That reputation only grew with the election of Marjorie Taylor Greene (of Georgia) and Lauren Boebert (of Colorado) in 2020.

Those two — along with Gaetz — became the best known members of the Freedom Caucus. And while they voted conservatively, all three were far less well known for what they did inside of Congress than what they did outside of it — becoming darlings of the conservative media circuit.

To the extent they shared any sort of views, it was election denialism and unwavering support of Trump. Which, as anyone who has followed Trump’s career (and beliefs) knows, is a moving target — to put in kindly.

And, as far back as a year ago, it was clear that the clamor to be THE voice of the Freedom Caucus was causing strains — most notably between Boebert and Greene.

As POLITICO wrote in April 2022:

The run-in between Greene and Boebert is a microcosm of a bigger identity crisis that’s starting to take hold within the Freedom Caucus. A group founded with right-leaning policy ambition that later became a Donald Trump defense team is starting to split in important ways, from how to respond to this week’s Kevin McCarthy tapes to — more fundamentally — whether to reorient itself back to its limited-government roots…

…Interviews with more than 40 Republicans — including 30 lawmakers, 16 of them in the Freedom Caucus — paint a picture of a group that shapeshifted as the GOP itself realigned during Trump’s presidency, becoming more populist and nationalist, but less bound by policy principles.

Which is a nice way of saying that the Freedom Caucus didn’t really believe in anything anymore. There were no policy priorities or attempts to sway leaders to their view.

Instead there were Fox News appearances, Twitter tirades and increasingly desperate attempts to curry favor with Trump.

That split became apparent during Kevin McCarthy’s prolonged bid for the speakership earlier this year. On one side was Greene, who apparently had made the decision that she was no longer happy being a bomb throwing back bencher and emerged as a major defender and ally of the Speaker-to-be. On the other were Gaetz and Boebert, both of whom led the charge against McCarthy before voting “present” on the 15th and final ballot.

And it all came to a head late last month when Green and Boebert got into a verbal altercation on the House floor that led to the Georgia Republicans referring to her Colorado colleague as a “little bitch.” (This was far from the first time the two had openly clashed.)

That episode led to Greene’s formal removal from the Freedom Caucus — a vote that apparently happened late last month but only went public last week.

As the Washington Post reported:

“Many in the far-right group had begun to grow uncomfortable with Greene’s participation after she threw her full support behind McCarthy this year. Greene had made the decision, The Washington Post previously reported, to position herself as a conduit of demands from the hard-right to Republican leadership, in hopes of advocating for conservative priorities while maintaining good relationships with both sides.”

Greene’s removal is the most visible sign yet of the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the modern Freedom Caucus.

A group organized around members who love publicity and are willing to do whatever it takes to get noticed is not going to be a group that sticks around for the long haul.

The power of the Freedom Caucus, such as it was, was that when they voted as a bloc they could keep Republicans — when in the majority — from getting what they wanted. Which gave them power.

As the group devolved into a series of personalities all angling to be the big dog, it lost that unity that made it an effective force earlier in its existence.

Which makes the stories of its demise — or at least its fracturing — have the feel of inevitability. Increasingly, there was nothing at the center of the Freedom Caucus aside from egos. And egos don’t make a coalition.