What Do The Republicans Want?
The Speaker of the House is now a puppet of the far right. What does that mean?
The spectacle of the Speaker of the House election led many (Republicans and Democrats alike) to decry the unorthodox means by which the Freedom Caucus—the now-mainstream, right wing group of radical Republicans—managed to deny Kevin McCarthy an easy installation as Speaker. Yes, this was the first time in 100 years that the election of the Speaker took more than a ceremonial five minute vote.
This time, however, the methods of the Freedom Caucus weren’t really the problem. Indeed, some commentators have taken to calling the contested Speaker election an “insurrection by other means,” or “an attack on the Capitol,” drawing a direct parallel with the actual insurrection of 2021.
I guess we have to forgive these inevitable comparisons between the election for Speaker of the House with January 6th (2021), which of course is the date of the literal coup attempt that culminated with a deadly attack on the institution of Congress itself. The comparison is inevitable not only because of the date (the 2023 Speaker of the House election reached its climax on January 6), but more importantly because many in and around the Freedom Caucus directly supported (and participated in) the 2021 coup attempt. Especially visible on both January sixes, for example, is my very own representative in the House, Scott Perry from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. (More on his splendid efforts in just a moment.) Such support for the attempted coup in 2021, it goes without saying, is inexcusable. Clearly, the means of that actual insurrection were themselves very much the problem. That they failed in 2021 (and the fact that Biden was, in fact, sworn in as president a few weeks later) absolutely does not excuse Perry and his ilk from everything that they did: from cheering on the seditionists, to exploiting loopholes in election law, to abusing their power as Members of Congress by, in bad faith, formally objecting to counting and certifying ballots from the Electoral College. The problem in 2021, really, was just as much the means as it was the ends.
This time, though, in 2023, the problem much less about their means. The problem is their ends.
Think about it: who really cares if the Speaker of the House election was contentious? That the Freedom Caucus used their leverage to force a negotiation with McCarthy is not, in itself, a problem. (Indeed—it would have been great if the Progressive Caucus had been better able to use leverage against Speaker Nancy Pelosi to enable better lawmaking during the Obama and Biden presidencies.) My point is that there has been too much attention on the spectacle of the Speaker election, and not nearly enough attention on the goals of the Freedom Caucus.
We need to ask: What does the Freedom Caucus want?
In a word: destruction.
The Freedom Caucus is pure, distilled, weaponized “fiscal conservatism,” which has always been a cloak for destruction of the New Deal and the entire concept of public goods. The Freedom Caucus is interested mainly in undoing everything that the Civil Rights, Feminist, and Labor Movements accomplished in the past century. They will use any means at their disposal to accomplish this.
This extremist group has been, so far, quite successful in normalizing its policy platform. They have come a long way since 2015, when members of the group tried to hide their membership out of fear that it might make them appear too extreme. Back then, in its early days, the Freedom Caucus called for defunding Planned Parenthood (so, typical Republican politics), but then also pushed against a completely non-controversial anti-discrimination law meant to protect pregnant people from getting fired. Then, again in 2015, they tried to roll back protections for marriage equality. They wanted to abolish New Deal institutions like the Export-Import Bank. And they attacked the Iran Nuclear Deal.
Today, the Freedom Caucus doesn’t hide any more. They proudly campaign as a unified group. They have 53 members in the House, up from 36 in 2016. If you listened to their speeches on the floor of the House, during the Speaker of the House election, you heard them—calm and bold—bring forward their radical policy agenda. They railed against immigration. They talked non-stop about crime, while expressing their undying support for law enforcement (with no apparent sense of shame given their efforts to undermine the Capitol Police). They demanded answers from China (on everything from COVID to intellectual property).
Yes, like most right-wingers, during the Speaker election, the Freedom Caucus skillfully used racist dog-whistles, messages clearly understood as bigoted language to those listening for it, while still maintaining plausible deniability.
For example, here was my Congressman, Scott Perry, on January 4, 2023, nominating Freedom Caucus member Byron Donalds (FL-19):
We have crime running across the streets, no matter which community you’re in. Because now this town [Washington, D.C.] has decided that somehow the criminals aren’t understood, and we have abandoned the victims…. We are funding wars in other countries while we are destroying our own military, because this town is broken.
Perry went on as he nominated Donalds, who is Black, to quote Fredrick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. He patronizingly applauded Donalds for coming from “a single family” [sic], perhaps meaning to say “a single parent family,” which was a talking point in other nominating speeches given by Perry’s colleagues. Perry concluded: “Byron has a big mind, and he’s big in stature as well. He’s very nice.”
Meanwhile, in keeping with dog whistling, several Freedom Caucus members went on cable television to proudly celebrate how their decision to nominate Donalds meant that two Black Congressmen were nominated, simultaneously, for Speaker of the House (the other nominee was Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York). Of course, Byron Donalds, with all due respect, had no chance of being elected—and the Freedom Caucus obviously knew that. They knew that they were using Donalds as part of their dog whistling, to put forward their “tough on crime,” and “support the police” messages.
Still, this time, with the election of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the means weren’t really the problem. It’s what the Freedom Caucus will do, now that they have bought and paid for Speaker McCarthy. Make no mistake: the Speaker of the House is now, functionally, a Freedom Caucus member. McCarthy is just a puppet of Perry and his dangerous associates: Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the rest. Never forget that these people are very much the same people who encouraged and facilitated the coup attempt in 2021. They will stop at absolutely nothing, in the weeks ahead, to accomplish their goal: the complete destruction of the Civil Rights, Feminist, and Labor reforms of the 1900s. This is the moment they have dreamed about.
And they’re winning.