When Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner unveiled Heritage Action in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he called it the “new fangs for the conservative beast.” Half a decade has passed and that beast has broken its teeth.
Shocking establishment and grass-roots circles alike Tuesday afternoon, Heritage Action CEO Mike Needham announced his departure from the behemoth. The conservative street fighter will soon join the more staid offices of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., as chief of staff, and his exit prompts an unavoidable and uncomfortable question: Who fears Heritage Action anymore?
If that 501(c)3 was a mafia (some of their critics certainly seemed to think of them that way), Needham was their don. After Heritage failed to prevent the birth of Obamacare, it was that Feulner protege who pushed weaponization inside the dusty and austere think tank. Needham rolled out a voter score card, trained up a grass-roots army, and marched them into war against blue and red enemy establishments alike.
The academics at Heritage would try to make Capitol Hill “see the light” with smart analysis and right conservative reasoning, Feulner was fond of saying. And if that failed, the politicos would “make them feel the heat.”
Plenty of Republicans got burned in the process, not least among them former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. When Heritage Action went on the warpath, they marked targets according to ideology, not partisan politics, and torpedoed as many Republicans as Democrats.
Their biggest scalp? The federal government’s. Five years ago, Heritage Action came roaring onto the scene when they helped shut down the government.
Heritage launched a national effort to defund Obamacare, to force then-President Barack Obama to defund his marquee legislative achievement. “Harnessing the power of the Tea Party,” Time Magazine observed at the time, “the political action arm of the once-esteemed Heritage Foundation has perfected the art of disrupting DC, whatever the cost.” It didn’t work.
After 16 days of darkness, the lights came back on and Obamacare was fully funded. Heritage Action got the blame for what establishment staffers would call “a Kamikaze run.” They also got begrudging respect.
Afraid of being flanked on other issues, Republicans brought Heritage Action to the table. In private, they cursed the ideological sniping, the scorched-earth strategy, and the friendly fire. In public, they made peace with the self-appointed conservative sentinels. It was no accident then, that when a freshly minted Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., outlined his vision for House Republicans in the intricate hall of the Library of Congress, Needham was given a front-row seat.
The detente became official with the election of President Trump. While other conservatives turned their noses up at the candidate, Heritage won out by looking past his heresies. Their white papers came back in demand and their wonks packed up to become White House staffers. At the beginning of this year, Heritage crooned that the administration had adopted “64 percent” of its agenda.
But Needham and Heritage Action weren’t at war in the interim. On their most important fight, they condemned the half-hearted House version of Obamacare repeal before bitterly acknowledging that the “imperfect legislative product” was better than nothing when it reached the Senate. Heritage Action went from being conservative guerilla platoon to being a toothless mascot. (You doubt that? Name a single major piece of legislation where a Heritage Action key vote decisively moved the dial.)
Now Needham is gone and the masthead of the conservative juggernaut is splintering. Russ Vought, vice president of grass-roots outreach, left to work as deputy Office of Management and Budget director at the beginning of the year, and more recently, Dan Ziegler, managing director of government relations, went on to direct the Republican Study Committee. What’s left of the old guard is led by Chief Operating Officer Tim Chapman, a whip-smart but soft-spoken operative the New Republic once described as “the golden retriever to Needham’s pitbull.”
Heritage Action will disagree, no doubt. But their key votes don’t define the debate in the sped-up Trump news cycle, and their score cards sound like white noise against Trump tweets. When they snarl and gurgle through broken teeth, who will listen? Needham has left and taken the fangs with him.
