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Tag: freedom caucus
Matt Gaetz

GOP Caucus Explodes With Accusations And Obscenities Over Shutdown

A House Republican caucus meeting went off the rails after Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) attacked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for contributing $5 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee and key members to bolster their funding for re-election in 2024, Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman reported on Thursday.

"How much of that is from FTX or Sam Bankman-Fried?" shot back Gaetz, referencing the cryptocurrency trading platform entrepreneur who, after donating money generously to both political parties, was arrested and charged with stealing clients' money to funnel into his own personal investment schemes.

Rep. French Hill (R-AR), a close associate of McCarthy, then barked out, "Oh, f--k off."

Gaetz, a key figure in the far-right House Freedom Caucus has for months been escalating a fight with McCarthy, who was only narrowly elected Speaker over the initial objections of much of the Freedom Caucus after making a number of concessions.

Earlier this week, he said he's ready to call a motion to vacate the chair, a procedure that could strip McCarthy of the Speakership.

All of this is occurring against the backdrop of a number of disputes within the House Republican caucus, including whether and how to move forward with an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, and how to pass the funding to avert a government shutdown, which now appears all but certain to happen on the weekend.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Kevin McCarthy

With Republicans In Revolt, McCarthy Fails On Defense Bill Again

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy suffered yet another loss on Thursday, one that no speaker should ever experience. Five of his Republican colleagues rebelled against sending the defense appropriations bill to the floor, and blocked it. Again. These things aren’t supposed to happen in the House. Speakers don’t put a bill on the floor when they don’t have the votes locked up. A controlling bloc of the majority doesn’t vote against leadership. Republicans don’t vote against defense spending.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is right: As speaker, she didn’t lose any rule votes—the procedural vote that kicks off consideration of a bill—because she didn’t put them on the floor without knowing she had the votes locked up. In fact, until McCarthy, it had been more than two decades since a rule vote failed on the floor. McCarthy has managed to do it three times in four months, and twice just this week.

Last week, McCarthy intended to put both the defense appropriations bill and a stopgap government funding bill on the floor in tandem. That quickly fell apart when the extremists in his raucous caucus made it clear they wouldn’t sign on, and he was forced to pull both from the floor—the smart thing to do.

The not-smart thing to do was to come back this week and try to put defense appropriations back on the floor without having worked out a plan with his hard-liners on government funding—or anything else. Which is exactly what McCarthy did Tuesday. He lost when GOP Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Ken Buck of Colorado, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Matt Rosendale of Montana all voted no.

The really not-smart thing to do was to try it again just two days later. This time around, it was Biggs, Bishop, and Rosendale again, joined by Reps. Eli Crane of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (so much for her being McCarthy’s ally). Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the Rules Committee, also voted no in a process move so that he can bring the bill to the floor in the future.

Greene drew a new line in the sand on the bill: All funding in it that might go to Ukraine has to be split out. Now, if McCarthy wants to get Greene back on board, leadership has to go back to the Rules Committee and rewrite it, stripping out anything to do with Ukraine aid. Even doing that is no guarantee that McCarthy can get everyone else on board—or even get enough votes to let the defense bill pass.

Again, this is defense spending. Republicans are hating on the troops. This is the House McCarthy built. House Republicans can’t even fund the military.

At this point, the hard-liners are toying with McCarthy just because they can. Unless he gets wise—and soon—a government shutdown is inevitable. It’s all they will allow. McCarthy’s only option to stop them is to work with Democrats.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Freedom Caucus

Celebrating Its Chaos, Freedom Caucus Expels Margie

While House Republican leadership is desperately trying to tamp down the narrative of a party in total disarray, the House Freedom Caucus crowd is reveling in the free-for-all. At least, that’s what some of them are telling PunchBowl News. The group “is finding unity in disunity,” Punchbowl reports, which is some bullshit justifying the constant infighting and power struggles that have seen them squabbling on the House floor and fighting over who to purge from their ranks. That internecine warfare is all good, one member says, because it shows their independence or something.

“Unity and conformity are two different things,” Texas Rep. Michael Cloud says. “If everybody thought the same, then you have a lot of duplication that’s unnecessary. So, I see that as a strength.” Unnecessary duplication would also be what you call a governing majority in a parliamentary body, but never mind. The priority of the members of the Freedom Caucus is definitely not governing.

The “identity crisis” in the caucus has been brewing for well over a year with the influx of MAGA members intent on building their own personal brand. The likes of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and former Rep. Madison Cawthorne are all vying to be the most outrageous, obnoxious, attention-grabbing far-right personality of the day. They butted up against the old guard, like Rep. Jim Jordan, who wanted to use the tools of the system to … build his personal brand, centered on yelling about the Biden Crime Family in committee hearings.

The latest in-group skirmish is that well-publicized blow-up between Boebert and Greene over who gets credit for trying to impeach President Joe Biden. That gave many in the caucus the excuse they’ve been looking for to take on Greene, which they did just before leaving for the July 4 recess. The caucus held a vote on whether or not to expel her for all the things they’re mad about, mostly that she’s too cozy with Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Because of course any group that wants to see its agenda succeed can’t be caught working with leadership to grease the skids? These people.

The caucus has been trying to keep the result of that vote on Greene’s membership and her status in the group a secret. Of course that didn’t work, these people are too keen on blabbing and sniping about each other to reporters. Maryland member Rep. Andy Harris let the cat out of the bag: She’s out in what he calls “an appropriate action” for her betrayals.

On the one hand, this group’s inability to all row together in the same direction is a good thing for preserving democracy. Their constant stumbling over each other and their inability to say “yes” when they’re getting concessions means a lot of destructive legislation hasn’t happened over the years. At the same time, the chaos combined with a tiny Republican majority in the House gives every single one of them the power to blow things up.

For some reason, this chaos has actually attracted new members. If anything, the growth of the Freedom Caucus is a condemnation of the rest of the House Republican conference, which has the numbers to crush the few dozen-member caucus on votes if the majority of House Republicans would use them. However, that would mean working across the aisle with Democrats. So far, the so-called moderates prefer to let the nihilists call the shots.

They’re following their leader, who is going to cater to—or crater to—the extremists every time. Before they took off for their extended Independence Day break, McCarthy had yet another meeting with the Freedom Caucus, pleading with them to let him do his job and fund the government. That’s an appeal that’s unlikely to work because the misfits seem hellbent on making sure that spotlight is focused intensely on their petty protests rather than actually getting anything done.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Freedom Caucus

Blowup: Will House Freedom Caucus Purge 'Impure' Margie Greene?

The latest blow-up in the House Freedom Caucus, pitting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene against Rep. Lauren Boebert in battle for the title of wingnuttiest of them all, is history repeating itself. Since the gang got together after the 2014 midterm blow-out that gave Republicans a big majority during Obama’s second term, the caucus has spent at least as much time on purity tests within its own ranks as it has blowing up everything else.

The group is currently squabbling over whether or not to have a purge, who gets credit for trying to impeach President Joe Biden, if or when they’re going to try to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and whether or not founding member Rep. Jim Jordan has been co-opted and can be trusted. It’s the old story of the gang that just can’t say “yes.”

They’ve arguably got the most power they’ve ever had since they put McCarthy in the speaker’s chair. They have high-profile seats, and sometimes control, over key committees. They’ve shown their ability to shut the House down and bend McCarthy to their will, but they just can’t stop turning on each other.

The Boebert-Greene kerfuffle is par for the course. Boebert is exploiting the fact that many of her colleagues don’t trust Greene since Greene cozied up to McCarthy. In fact, when they’re talking purges—and “at least two hardliners” are, according to Politico—Greene is at the top of the list, along with unnamed others who are “too aligned with GOP leaders and too outwardly critical of the group when it splits on certain issues.”

The current chair of the group, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, says he’s refused the purge request. That’s not going to stop the infighting. There are too many fracture points, as South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman was happy to explain. “The speaker’s race, there was some difference in opinion. The debt ceiling, there were differences of opinion. And we had to get 80 percent on any major issue that we take positions on,” he told Politico. “On some big issues, we have not been able to get there … We’re at a critical point right now.” Yes, they’re still fighting with each other over the speaker’s race and the debt ceiling deal.

Some of them are also looking sideways at Rep. Jim Jordan, one of the group’s founders. He was the choice of some of the members for speaker, but he was too focused on getting the powerful Judiciary Committee chair to consider it. He now has the power to hold all the hearings he wants on all the made-up issues he cares about and spend all his time yelling for the cameras, seemingly his goal in life. That’s causing “some conservative grumbling behind closed doors about his hand-in-glove work with McCarthy.”

It’s a good thing for the country that the extreme far-right in the House spend so much time fighting each other and leadership. They work so hard to be anti-establishment, they can’t see when they’re winning.

Remember the “grand bargain” of 2011, when Republicans were oh-so close to getting President Barack Obama to agree to cuts to Social Security and Medicare? The hardliners—the members who would come together in a few years to become the Freedom Caucus—balked, and wouldn’t let it happen because it came with some tax increases on the rich. The decades-long GOP goal of undermining Social Security and Medicare went down the drain. And with it, the speakership of John Boehner.

And then, in 2017, Republicans were on the brink of repealing the Affordable Care Act, the hated bill that gave Republicans such a big majority in 2014 and helped spawn the Freedom Caucus. The Freedom Caucus was so distrustful of then-Speaker Paul Ryan that they torpedoed the plan. Paul Ryan decided to retire rather than have to keep dealing with this group of misfits.

If the Freedom Caucus and fellow hardliners couldn’t be relied upon to trip over their own feet, Social Security and Medicare would be failing and Obamacare repealed. That’s the upside of their existence. That and the entertainment value of watching them take down one Republican speaker after another.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.