Tim Alberta:
When Representative Mark Meadows filed his motion to vacate the chair, effectively calling for the removal of John Boehner as speaker of the House, he accused the Republican leader of constricting the legislative process, consolidating power atop the party, and — worst of all to Meadows and other restive conservatives —using “the power of the office to punish Members who vote according to their conscience instead of the will of the Speaker.”
That was in July 2015. One year later, activists from around the country were organizing support for a rule that would allow delegates at the Republican National Convention to vote their conscience in choosing the party’s presidential nominee — and give Republicans a last-ditch opportunity to dump Donald Trump. Meadows, in his second term representing North Carolina’s 11th district, did not support the effort. “We’re a nation of laws and a party of rules,” he said in an interview prior to the convention.
This sentiment was shared by his colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus, a club of 39 tea-party-inspired Republican lawmakers who have shown zero tolerance for moderation or compromise during Barack Obama’s presidency, alienating GOP leaders by prioritizing ideological purity over partisan unity. These conservatives have little in common with Trump, and just one of the 39 endorsed him during the primary. But none of them publicly supported the effort to defeat Trump in Cleveland — even though he makes Boehner look like Edmund Burke by comparison, and despite the fact that delegates were seeking the same freedom to vote their conscience that House conservatives had demanded for themselves.
The parallel is imperfect — representatives have historically been permitted by party leadership to vote their conscience, while convention delegates are traditionally bound to vote in accordance with the result of their state’s primary or caucus — yet instructive in debating a question that is fundamental to understanding the implications of 2016: Why wasn’t there widespread, principled conservative opposition to Trump?
Tea-party lawmakers tried twice on the House floor, in January 2013 and in January 2015, to oust Boehner. It was Meadows’s motion — a parliamentary maneuver so brazen and irregular that it was filed over the objection of his own Freedom Caucus comrades — that finally backed Boehner into a corner. Two months later, near the end of last September, the speaker announced his resignation. Boehner’s adversaries celebrated his demise, certain that it represented a tipping point at which small-government Constitutionalists would retake control of the Republican party. But at the same time, a new and asymmetrical threat was emerging.
Trump — real-estate mogul, reality-TV star, political novice — had surged from the mid-teens in national polling to 30 percent, establishing a lead over the GOP field that he would never relinquish. His ascent sounded alarms across the ideological spectrum, from Mitt Romney, the party’s moderate-minded 2012 nominee-turned-elder statesman, to Ben Sasse, the tea-party-fueled freshman senator from Nebraska. As Trump gained viability, a growing chorus of Republicans voiced grave objections to his candidacy.
But there was no such resistance from the Freedom Caucus.
In one of the strangest twists of 2016, the GOP’s most notorious collection of arch-conservatives — known for running toward intra-party fights and winning them by any means necessary — did noticeably little to oppose or obstruct the rise of a Republican who has campaigned on ideas that are antithetical to modern conservatism: maintaining the status quo on entitlements; borrowing money to pay for infrastructure projects and other domestic initiatives; introducing universal, government-run health care; and supporting Planned Parenthood, the abortion provider House conservatives have spent years attempting to defund, among other things.
Despite these clear policy differences — and rhetorical undertones hinting at an authoritarian approach that could make Obama’s “imperial presidency” look downright Jeffersonian — the Freedom Caucus has shown little appetite for battling Trump. None of its 39 members self-identified with the Never Trump movement during the GOP primary. Once Trump clinched the nomination, none of them endorsed the efforts to defeat him at the convention. And now that he is formally the nominee, only one member, libertarian-leaning Justin Amash of Michigan, has pledged not to vote for him in November.
