Two days: that’s how long it took President Trump to heed the call from Republican lawmakers, exasperated with their ideologue colleagues, to do something about the House Freedom Caucus.
On Thursday he responded in force, realizing that House Speaker Paul Ryan’s hands are tied and that only he can break the logjam in the House or let his administration’s agenda wither before he even hits his 100th day in office.
“Yes,” House GOP leaders should punish the dozen or so Freedom Caucus members who refused Trump’s entreaties to support the leadership’s healthcare bill, Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., told the Washington Examiner. But “no” he doesn’t think it will happen, he admitted.
That’s the reality facing the Wisconsin Republican and the rest of his leadership team—they have no stick to keep wayward members in line. Former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, used about the only tool available to modern speakers when the raucous caucus bucked him on spending bills and forced government shutdowns. He kicked the ringleaders’ off choice committees or, in the case of former Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, took away assignments central to their political livelihoods. But the move backfired. He was forced to reinstate some of the insurgents and ultimately lost the war when they successfully drove him from the speakership.
“I don’t think they’re going to get kicked off their committees,” a top aide to one of Trump’s top Hill lieutenants said. “It doesn’t work like that here anymore, and that’s probably why there’s so much dysfunction.”
The prevailing anti-establishment sentiment among GOP voters also makes threatening to back a rebel’s primary opponent or cut off their party funding futile, as most likely it would just boomerang on leadership. Witness how without doing any of the above Ryan faced an upstart primary challenger himself last year.
Publicly, House leaders, their whip team and their aides have to seem OK with essentially being given the middle finger from the 30-some members time and time again. Privately, they hoped the Freedom Caucus’ healthcare gambit would enrage Trump and trigger his well-honed retaliatory instincts.
And that’s what happened.
“Look, I understand the president’s frustration,” Ryan said during his weekly news conference Thursday. “What I am encouraging our members to do is keep talking with each other until we can get the consensus to pass this bill. But it’s very understandable that the president is frustrated … you all know that he does that in various forms, including Twitter. And I understand his frustration.”
Trump and Ryan are not the only frustrated Republicans in Washington.
“You know we have one conference, we don’t need two conferences or three conferences,” Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, told the Washington Examiner.
Members have to decide for themselves whether “their loyalty is to their caucus or their conference,” Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., said. “Mine is to my conference.”
Rank-and-file Republicans now openly chastise the holdouts but the most strident Freedom Caucus members have shown they are impervious to peer pressure.
They “seem to be emboldened by what they’ve done, which is not a good sign of our conference coming back together,” Collins said. “We need to come back together and start agreeing on things.”
Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla., laid out the new dynamic that Freedom Caucus leaders either did not see or don’t mind enduring.
Trump “doesn’t have to be,” all right with being disobeyed, Rooney told the Washington Examiner. “He’s in a different situation than Speaker Boehner or Speaker Ryan is — that he needs to sort of kinda try to keep them in the fold as much as possible. I don’t think that President Trump feels that he needs to do that as much,” said Rooney, who is a member of the House whip team.
Whether the Freedom Caucus comes back to the fold or remains astray is an open question.
At least one said he is willing to take the hits until he gets the full repeal of the Affordable Care Act he seeks.
“I didn’t come here for a job,” Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., explained to the Washington Examiner. “I came here for a cause.”
