House Freedom Caucus approaches a crossroads

The House Freedom Caucus is in flux.

Rep. Bob Good, who assumed the chairmanship of the Freedom Caucus in January, is on the losing end of a GOP primary race in Virginia, though a recount he called for won’t reach its conclusion for several weeks. If the result remains the same, Mr. Good would be the first Freedom Caucus chair to be voted out in the middle of his term, and his fall would allow members to contemplate the group’s course.

House Republicans have been frustrated with the Freedom Caucus’ disruptive actions under the leadership of Mr. Good, including accusations that caucus members are sabotaging the House Republicans’ agenda.

The shift in political winds against Mr. Good was not tied directly to his role in the Freedom Caucus, but his downfall nevertheless jostled the group. For various reasons, fellow House Republicans, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and, most importantly, former President Donald Trump backed Mr. Good’s primary opponent, Virginia state Sen. John McGuire.

Mr. Good viewed the opposition in his race as an effort by establishment Republicans to maintain the status quo of working with Democrats to fund war in Ukraine, drive up federal spending and reauthorize a foreign surveillance law that allows warrantless spying on Americans. He said he represents the opposite, someone who “fights the Democrats” and policies Republicans campaigned against.

“What kind of a party are we going to be?” Mr. Good told The Washington Times. “And I think my race was a decision between those two visions.”

But Mr. Good’s pending exit puts the House Freedom Caucus at a crossroads. He declined to say whether he intends to remain chair through the end of the year if he loses the recount, saying, “We’ll determine what we do from there once that happens.”

Whichever direction the caucus takes, its role of guiding or challenging GOP leadership will largely be decided by the outcome of the November election and whether Republicans keep the House majority or win other levers of power in Washington.

Republican critics of the caucus want to see it return to its tea party roots rather than continue as the “chaos caucus.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was ousted from the Freedom Caucus last year, has become a leading critic.

She told The Times that the group has chosen the “anti-leadership” moniker as its only identity in the Republican conference. That all starts with Mr. Good, she said.

“They’ve been in shambles for a really long time. You know, it’s been falling apart and they’ve lost a lot of donations because of it. And they don’t even know what their identity is right now,” Ms. Greene said.

Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona, a Freedom Caucus member who embraced the hard-liner label, said his House colleagues’ effort to take out Mr. Good will have repercussions throughout the conference but won’t tame “stronger” Freedom Caucus members.

Mr. Crane said he will “absolutely not” change how he operates.

“Hell, no. We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing,” he said. “I realize that the swamp is going to continue to gun for me. And if they get me, they get me.”

The House Freedom Caucus began in 2015 as an offshoot of the tea party movement, organized by lawmakers disillusioned with the Republican Study Committee, the largest House GOP conservative caucus.

The Freedom Caucus was built as a foil to House Speaker John Boehner, who stared down their moves to oust him but eventually resigned from Congress.

Founding members of the caucus include Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and other Republican lawmakers who went on to prominent roles outside Congress, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Trump White House officials Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows.

Rep. Max Miller of Ohio, a staunch GOP critic of Mr. Good’s Freedom Caucus, said he wanted to see the faction return to how it operated in its early years.

“They’ve lost their footing of where they started, and they’ve gone too far,” Mr. Miller said. “And to me, almost like the Democrats, they have no plan. Or they just continue to act and to try to get their own way because in my opinion, for a lot of them, it’s all about I, I, I — and not we.”

House Republicans have grown particularly weary of the Freedom Caucus’ willingness to blow up votes on Republican bills that bog down the legislative process.

Rep. Chip Roy, Texas Republican, said the Freedom Caucus’ mission of forcing change and forcing “Republicans to do what they said they would do” has not changed one bit since its inception.

He argued that major Republican victories since 2022, including a House-passed border bill or cuts to nondefense spending in the debt ceiling law, were ushered in by the Freedom Caucus. 

“We’ve forced a bunch of the policy decisions and fights,” Mr. Roy said. “We’ve got a lot of really good amendments that are offered as the Republican position. That’s all being driven by the Freedom Caucus, and I’m proud of that.”

In many ways, the original intent of the Freedom Caucus to disrupt and shape the House to pass more conservative legislation has not changed since the group’s inception.

But Rep. David Schweikert, a former Freedom Caucus member, argued that a shift from trying — and being willing to fail — to pass conservative laws was replaced with more populist passions to seek retribution in Congress.

Mr. Schweikert, Arizona Republican, said that around 2017, the Freedom Caucus began to shift to a more populist dynamic — similar to the far-left “Squad” that cropped up around the same time — as a reflection of voters who were growing more polarized in the early years of the Trump administration.

“For an organization to be productive, it can’t be about resentments,” Mr. Schweikert said. “I think sometimes this place has lost its moral compass on making people’s lives better. That has to be the fixation, not retribution for offenses.”

In the vein of returning to that mission, Mr. Schweikert thinks Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio would make a great Freedom Caucus chair. 

Mr. Davidson, however, is on shaky standing in the group after he shocked his colleagues with a last-minute endorsement of Mr. McGuire. He argued his choice wasn’t a slight to the Freedom Caucus but about Mr. Good not being an effective member of Congress.

Mr. Davidson declined to speak with The Times but said in a thread on X that the Freedom Caucus is greater than Mr. Good, “which is why Bob wants it to be about HFC rather than him. Very disappointing.”

Other Freedom Caucus members agreed Mr. Good’s loss does not speak to broader issues with the group’s standing in Congress.

“The outcome of one race for one member does not change the brand and the credibility, quite frankly, of the Freedom Caucus,” Rep. Andy Ogles, Tennessee Republican, told The Times. 

Though notoriously tight-lipped about the group’s inner workings, members told The Times that there are no plans to remove Mr. Good as chair if he loses his recount. As for changing the course of the caucus, most members are happy with the way it is.

“The focus of Freedom Caucus is not something that happens at key points,” said Freedom Caucus member Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida. “It happens all the time. So those are internal discussions about what are we going to do on various issues, and what’s going to be our position. We have that conversation, it seems like, every other week, so nothing has changed here.”