With Trump atop GOP, conservatives could lose influence on Capitol Hill

Everyone watched as Trump laid waste to the governing wing of the Republican Party on his way to seizing its presidential nomination, which will be officially bestowed on him at the July convention.

Less visible but just as significant was the New York businessman’s stinging defeat of the conservative groups that for years have lorded over the party’s agenda and served as ideological gatekeepers.

Fiscally hawkish groups like Heritage Action for America and Club for Growth — the club opposed Trump in the primary — have proven successful at pressuring GOP lawmakers to adopt their vision for small government and free markets.

But Trump won the nomination despite discarding conservative dogma that most congressional Republicans view as untouchable. Republican voters have spoken, and they don’t appear interested in ideological purity.

This could seriously weaken the conservative pressure groups’ influence among Republicans on Capitol Hill. It is already forcing them to rethink their place in a GOP led by Trump.

“This is sort of a rebuilding year for the conservative movement,” Jason Pye, a spokesman for FreedomWorks, told the Washington Examiner on Monday.

The powerful conservative advocacy groups have played a central role in pushing the GOP to embrace a limited government, free market agenda that calls for overhauling entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and rescinding support for “crony capitalist” policies such as taxpayer subsidies for favored industries, like ethanol production in Iowa.

Trump campaigned aggressively against all of that. He supports government intervention in the economy, particularly when it involves international trade and corporations that want to relocate out of the country, and he opposes entitlement reform. The billionaire has appeared at times to try and decouple conservatism from the GOP.

“I’m a conservative. But don’t forget, this is called the Republican Party. It’s not called the Conservative Party. You know, there are conservative parties. It’s called the Republican Party,” Trump said in a recent television interview.

Conservative officials concede that influencing Republican lawmakers is likely to become more difficult with Trump atop the party.

Competing with pressure brought to bear by a White House of the same party is always difficult. But if Trump wins, Republicans in Congress could point to their standard bearer as proof that voters aren’t interested in the agenda the conservative groups are pushing. They might even believe it.

Among the candidates Trump defeated were Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who earned legislative scores of 100 percent, and 90 percent, respectively, from Heritage Action for America. From the Club for Growth, Cruz earned a 96 percent, and Rubio a 94 percent.

“There will be folks in the middle who just look up and say: ‘Which way is the Republican way? I’ll just vote for that,'” said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth and a former congressman from Indiana. “It’ll be confusing.”

The club invested heavily to defeat Trump and has since shifted resources to congressional primaries. McIntosh said he hopes that Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah oppose a Trump White House when necessary, and push their colleagues to maintain traditional conservative principles.

Especially since Republicans captured the House in 2010 after four years in the minority, conservative groups have employed a variety of strong arm tactics to influence the party’s agenda, or, if they failed at that, to block alternative legislation from passing.

That included threats to recruit and fund challengers in GOP primaries, and in some cases doing so successfully; harnessing pressure from grassroots Republicans and conservative talk radio hosts by enforcing “key votes” on legislation; and working closely with insurgent conservative lawmakers to withhold votes needed for passage and otherwise gridlock the legislative process.

Working with allied lawmakers (a minority of congressional Republicans overall,) conservative pressure groups have blocked budget bills, derailed legislation to fund key agencies like the Department of Transportation, and shut down the government in an ultimately failed bid to defund Obamacare.

In the House, most of the conservative groups’ allies now coalesce under the banner of Freedom Caucus. As long as it’s unified, the group can block House GOP leadership from assembling a Republican majority of 218 votes, the number required to pass bills without Democratic support.

But as the Freedom Caucus looks ahead to life under Trump, its members recognize that they could lose the “leverage” they have enjoyed to influence policy and legislation. That’s because a Trump administration could hold more sway with congressional Republicans than the pressure groups it works with on the outside.

“Without a doubt, it would be disingenuous to suggest that things wouldn’t be different,” said Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a Freedom Caucus leader who has pledged to support the Republican nominee but originally backed Cruz. In a Trump administration, Meadows said he envisions his group acting as an “accountability mechanism” as opposed to a “change agent.”

Not all conservative pressure groups are as worried about Trump’s impact. Americans for Tax Reform, keeper of the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” that most Republican candidates and incumbents have signed, is bullish on Trump’s tax policy.

Trump hasn’t signed the pledge, and he has floated raising taxes on wealthy earners. But Grover Norquist, who leads ATR and promotes the pledge aggressively, said the presumptive nominee’s tax reform plan would lower corporate taxes and result in “no net” tax increase for any income bracket, while generating robust economic growth.

What if Norquist is wrong and Trump goes a different direction?

Most congressional Republicans have signed the pledge and refused to support tax increases while in office, and Norquist is confident that they would hold the line. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush was ousted in part because he lost GOP support after abandoning his promise not to raise taxes.

Norquist believes the political lesson from that election still resonates.

“Trump has actually said he would not support a net tax increase. He’s verbally made that commitment. That said, the power in this town, on taxes and spending, rests with the House and Senate,” Norquist said. “You can’t raise taxes without Congress.”