‘You’re Irrelevant’: House Republicans Roll Their Eyes at the Freedom Caucus

It’s not hard to find a House Republican frustrated with the House Freedom Caucus.

Just this year, again and again and again and again and again, members of the Freedom Caucus have trashed what they’re voting on as insufficiently conservative, only for those very same members to suddenly fall in line and support what’s before them with hardly any real concessions.

As Republicans scrambled to wrap up their massive reconciliation bill earlier this month, it was a pattern on full display. A handful of Freedom Caucus members labeled the bill as everything from “Frankenstein” to a “travesty,” set a record for stalling a procedural vote over seven hours, and in the end, voted for it anyway.

“It’s just a lot of drama,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a member of the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus, told NOTUS. “A lot of frustration.”

“I never fault any member for fighting for their beliefs and their values and their priorities,” she said. “It’d just be much smoother if we could just do things more as a team.”

Rep. Max Miller, a key Trump administration ally, went even further.

“It puts the rest of us in the conference in a bad position when you market yourself as this big, conservative freedom fighter, when in the end you took the same vote like everybody else, and you got nothing for it,” he said.

“The House Freedom Caucus can hit the issue right on the nose,” he added. “And on this one, they missed the mark completely and they almost gave — like the Democrats who voted for it — the largest tax hike in our country’s history to every single American.”

Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a frequent critic of the Freedom Caucus, went even further.

“It’s not becoming frustrating; it’s been frustrating for the last two-plus years,” Van Orden said.

“I don’t work for the Freedom Caucus,” he continued, as if that needed clarification. “And here’s what’s just shameful. So many of those guys are my friends, and they’re really smart guys — like Andy Harris is a very smart man. It’s just, it’s so disruptive.”

“Disruptive” has always been the Freedom Caucus’ style. Conservative hard-liners founded the group a decade ago seemingly with legislative chaos as its tactical North Star. Holding up floor action for hours hardly compares to former caucus Chair Bob Good stripping Kevin McCarthy’s speaker’s gavel, or former chairs Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows taking down an Affordable Care Act replacement bill so they could force the legislation to undermine protections for people with preexisting conditions.

As the caucus has increasingly aligned its mission with President Donald Trump, other Republicans have bristled at the group’s apparently hollow threats.

To hear critics tell it, the Freedom Caucus’ refusal to seriously impede the Trump agenda has defanged the group.

When the Freedom Caucus was at its most effective, members could credibly claim a willingness to say “no.” Leaders had to negotiate with the Freedom Caucus because they would readily obstruct GOP priorities. But now, with so few of the group’s members willing to defy Trump, the process of threatening to take down legislation, going through the motions of complaining, seems more like a charade.

Critics say the group’s once-principled protests look more like ever-petulant whines. Where their demands were once only quelled with significant legislative concessions, they now are satisfied with some far-off promises and a face-to-face with Trump.

But as members of the Freedom Caucus insisted to NOTUS, their strategy of holding out and temporarily derailing House business just to support legislation in the end isn’t just an acceptable approach; it’s an effective one.

“They literally said we weren’t going to touch Medicaid,” Rep. Chip Roy, a senior member of the caucus, told NOTUS. “And we touched a trillion dollars worth of Medicaid.”

“The only way to get things in this town is to demand the moon and then take somewhere in between,” Roy said. “And that’s what we did, and I’m proud of that again. If I were czar, I would have done a lot more, but I’m not.”

Roy — who has become something of a poster child for Freedom Caucus flip-flopping — is right that by consistently objecting to steps of the reconciliation process, members did cajole leadership to pursue deeper Medicaid cuts, accelerate work requirements and freeze provider taxes, despite the political threat to more moderate and vulnerable Republicans who were ostensibly seeking to protect the program.

But it’s also true that after conservatives won the cuts, they still said the reconciliation bill wasn’t good enough.

Roy said he would vote “no” just the day before he voted “yes,” without any changes to the bill. And in that weeklong period between when Roy declared himself a reconciliation bill opponent only to become an enthusiastic supporter, he enjoyed attention from the media and the president, leaving members like Van Orden to suggest that was their real prize all along.

“When you’re focused on, how many times can I go on cable television in a day? How many reporters will pull me aside to ask me questions? How many social media posts can I do? And what are my fundraising numbers, as compared to doing your job, which is legislating,” he said, “you’re irrelevant.”

But whether the group is actually irrelevant may depend on your perspective. Rep. Eric Burlison, a member of the Freedom Caucus, insisted to NOTUS that the holdouts got plenty more than a phone call from the president as they delayed reconciliation’s final passage.

“At 10 o’clock at night, we gave the White House a list of things. We were told, basically, ‘We can’t do that.’” Burlison said, “By 2 a.m. they agreed to pretty much everything we had asked for. And yet, people say we got nothing.”

When NOTUS pressed on what exactly was on the wishlist and what the White House granted, Burlison said, “One of the requests from the White House is that we don’t talk about it,” but that it was “nothing personal” and all related to reducing the deficit.

Another Freedom Caucus member, Rep. Josh Brecheen, was even more cryptic.

“In some situations, there are discussions that may lead to the same vote,” Brecheen said, “but the assurances that come through that day-long deliberations, commitments for things that will happen in the future that otherwise would not happen.”

“These people are not doing this to grandstand,” he said.

But again, when NOTUS asked for the specific concessions the Freedom Caucus won, Brecheen said he was “just speaking in generalities.”

“As my 94-year-old grandfather said to me one time, ‘Son, you’re hemming me in too tight,’” Brecheen said.

A Republican skeptic might say — and there are many such skeptics in Congress — that there was no deal and the phantom compromises were just figments of the Freedom Caucus’ imagination, that what they got were just some wishy-washy promises from the White House.

As Rep. Kevin Hern, the former chair of the Republican Study Committee, told NOTUS, “Time and time again, it’s been folks that just wanted to be heard.”

But there are some Republicans not in the Freedom Caucus who think the group has been successful in winning concessions.

Rep. Dusty Johnson, the chair of the Republican Main Street Partnership and a key leadership ally, argued that he had repeatedly made deals with the Freedom Caucus, including during the reconciliation process.

“I managed to cut deals. I managed to negotiate deals, along with many other people in partnership with the Freedom Caucus, that have helped to advance major legislative accomplishments. That sounds pretty productive to me,” Johnson told NOTUS.

“It seems to me that some of some of my more critical colleagues in the House will allege both that the Freedom Caucus is too intransigent and that they don’t get enough wins before getting to ‘yes,’” Johnson added. “They can’t both be true.”

Johnson offered this assessment of the Freedom Caucus as the group was, once again, holding the House floor hostage on Wednesday. A handful of Freedom Caucus members had objected to a procedural vote on a trio of cryptocurrency bills.

Their concern was that a bill banning federal reserve banks from issuing digital assets would not make it through the Senate on its own. They sought to combine that bill with a more popular cryptocurrency measure.

Their stand on procedural bills won them a meeting at the White House, some free District Taco in a Capitol suite and a promise from GOP leadership to instead attach the banking bill to must-pass defense authorization legislation later this year.

It’s a modest win, especially given that the Senate can still yank the cryptocurrency banking provision out of the defense bill. But after the reconciliation fight ended with Freedom Caucus members folding and accepting the Senate-passed language, the crypto ordeal was either the latest sign that the caucus was looking to make themselves relevant again or that they can’t be overlooked in the legislative process. It just depends on your perspective.

For Harris, the Freedom Caucus’ chair, it’s the latter.

“The House Freedom Caucus has been successful in pushing every piece of legislation to the most conservative version possible — every single time,” Harris said in a statement to NOTUS. “That’s not just our goal; it’s our mission.”

“We will never stop fighting to ensure the legislation that passes this House reflects the principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and freedom that the American people deserve,” he said. “As the conservative conscience of the Republican Conference, this is exactly why the House Freedom Caucus was formed, and it’s exactly what we will continue to do.”

(In a less diplomatic X statement, responding to CNN’s reporting on the caucus, Harris said, “As I told them when they tried to interview me for their hit piece: ‘You only wish we were actually ineffective. Interview is over.’ We’re winning. They’re whining. That tells you everything.”)

For all the complaining from the rest of the House Republican Conference, the Freedom Caucus seems bullish that they don’t have a credibility problem at all. If anything, Rep. Keith Self told NOTUS after the reconciliation bill drama, he feels more confident that, “Now, they know we’re serious.”

“They,” apparently meaning leadership, as well as Republicans, Democrats, the media and a Washington that’s increasingly questioning whether the Freedom Caucus has to be taken seriously.

When NOTUS asked another Freedom Caucus member, Rep. Michael Cloud, whether he was concerned the group no longer had credibility, his answer was emphatic: “Just absolutely no concern.”

“What a dumb story that you’re writing,” he said.