Congress has never seen anything quite like the House Freedom Caucus. At least since the Civil War, there hasn’t been a faction fighting both parties at the same time.

POLITICO

History Dept.

The Freedom Caucus’ Unprecedented Insurgency

At least since the Civil War, there hasn’t been a faction fighting both parties at the same time.

By Alan Greenblatt

October 18, 2015

AP Photo

Congress has never seen anything quite like the House Freedom Caucus. There’s always someone unhappy on Capitol Hill and it’s not unusual for malcontents to band together. A rebellion made up of members who refuse to work with either party, however, is something that hasn’t happened in living memory.

“This is an unusual and indeed unprecedented development in the history of the party,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, a research consultant to the Main Street Partnership, a centrist GOP group.

 

 

Parties—particularly those with large majorities—almost inevitably split into factions. And congressional history is replete with examples of groups that balked at party leadership. But the insurgents we remember—the ones who weren’t quickly and completely marginalized—managed by and large to find common cause with members of the other party. Southern Democrats, for instance, forged a “conservative coalition” with Republicans that dominated Congress for much of the 20th century.

There hasn’t been a bloc like the Freedom Caucus for at least a century, one that refuses to work with its own party leadership while being steadfastly unwilling to reach across the aisle. “There have been groups that often broke from the party, but in doing so, they didn’t stand as a third force,” says former GOP Rep. Mickey Edwards. “This group is very different.”

The Freedom Caucus, rather than breaking from Republican ranks, has forced Republican leaders to break from them. It’s a perverse sort of political jujitsu. One of outgoing Speaker John Boehner’s supposed crimes was that he went begging Democrats for help passing legislation when he couldn’t find the votes within his own caucus. Some rank-and-file Republicans, meanwhile, have made a separate peace with Democrats on reviving the Export-Import Bank. Normally the opposite would happen and it would be the insurgents reaching across the aisle. But that presupposes an interest in governing.

“I can think of a number of major examples throughout history where a party has had divisions of consequence,” says Laura Blessing, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Government Affairs Institute. “It’s rare that those divisions would represent a position on the fringe of the political system, where they’re not working with either party.”

Both the tactics and the playing field have changed for today’s dissenters. In the past, some members would squawk at autocratic leadership or the stated policies of their own party and look for ways to disrupt proceedings, but they had some kind of endgame in mind. Once they deposed a leader or got their way on a key vote, they took some quiet satisfaction.

What is distinctive about the current crop of congressional rebels is their willingness to use any lever they can find to cause trouble—debt-ceiling fights, funding fights, leadership succession struggles. “The thing that (today’s) conservatives are very good at—because they don’t care about precedent or the party’s history—is trying out different things,” says Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin, a history of the decline of moderate Republicans.

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