As the John Locke Foundation prepares to unveil soon its First in Freedom initiative, it’s interesting to note Joel Gehrke’s National Review Online article about congressional Republicans who are also placing a renewed emphasis on freedom.
The House Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only group, will work in concert in order to guide the House Republican Conference at key junctures, starting with the debate over a border-security bill that has conservatives alarmed.
“We’re going to focus on what we believe middle-class voters sent us here to do,” Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the de facto chairman of the organization pending leadership elections, tells National Review Online.
As a caucus devoted to moving leadership’s agenda to the right, the group has a chance to take over the traditional role of the Republican Study Committee, which many lawmakers believe has strayed from its founding mission as an organization designed to pressure moderate GOP leaders to adopt more conservative positions. National Journal first reported that such a group was forming.
Jordan, a former RSC chairman, wants to avoid any tension with the longer-standing group. “I like to think that a smaller, more cohesive, more agile group can buttress and support some of the good policies and good ideas that are coming from the RSC,” he says.
The group has nine founding members, including Jordan and Representatives Raúl Labrador (R., Idaho), Justin Amash (R., Mich.), Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.), John Fleming (R., Md.), Scott Garrett (R., N.J.), Mark Meadows (R., N.C.), Mick Mulvaney (R., S.C.), and Matt Salmon (R., Ariz.). The founding members will decide who receives an invitation to join the group; they’ll also pay “mortgages,” a higher level of funding for the organization than the rest of the dues-paying members will be required to provide. They hope to cap the group at around 40 lawmakers, and expect to debut with more than 30 — a crucial number, because it takes 29 dissents to block the House Republican majority from passing a bill.