The big failure of the House’s Trump-backed immigration bill on Wednesday showed why it’s always a bad idea to negotiate with the extremists of the House Freedom Caucus—after weeks of “negotiating,” even the leader of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows, voted against the bill. That he’d negotiated. Politico’s Rachael Bade has a long look at the ugly backstory there, and … yeah, never negotiate with the Freedom Caucus.
The extremists used “negotiating” to help kill the discharge petition effort by Republicans who wanted protections for Dreamers, and then, predictably, kept moving the goalposts.
“The Freedom Caucus people,” said Rep. Ryan Costello (R-Pa.), one of the discharge petition signers, “just kept negotiating themselves out of a deal.”
Because they didn’t really want a deal, you imbecile!
“Our members are angry, very angry. Everybody. Across the spectrum,” said a Republican leadership source involved in the talks. “People feel like they’ve been betrayed in this process. They feel like this has been ordeal. No one is happy.”
The Freedom Caucus exists to be angry and feel betrayed. If House Speaker Paul Ryan gave them a vote on everything they wanted up to and including mass executions of Dreamers, they’d still find a way to feel like he’d done them wrong. And that’s why it was always stupid to negotiate with them—there was no way they would ever compromise, and they were always going to be enraged by something in the process.
But somehow the media will find a way to keep pretending Ryan is anything but a failure as the leader of his party.