Increasingly frustrated with the size and direction of the Republican Study Committee, a handful of House Republicans have recently found respite in a smaller, private club founded by one of Congress's leading young conservatives.
The House Liberty Caucus, chaired by Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, quietly launched last year with five or six lawmakers attending a hastily choreographed meeting. Now the group holds a biweekly, invite-only luncheon that draws some two dozen lawmakers and is rapidly becoming an ideological home base for those "core" House conservatives who say the RSC's swelling membership is diluting its ideological intensity.
National Journal
"The House Liberty Caucus". I guess "The House God, Motherhood, and Apple Pie" caucus already exists. I would be very happy if conservatives would stop pretending that they are defending "liberty" when they defend "property rights" and so on, because there's a few millennia of history to suggest that people with property can act to reduce the freedom of their neighbors with less.
Anyway, this is a sign of what's happening in the GOP. The continual drive to be more "pure", to be "more conservative than thou", continues.
The ascent of Amash's right-wing group has not occurred in a vacuum. Rather, it roughly coincides with a power shift on Capitol Hill that saw momentum swing back toward the establishment after the government shutdown in October and Paul Ryan's budget compromise in December. Some RSC members, upset that the organization did not aggressively combat these forces, say its massive membership has turned the group into the proverbial big ship that turns slowly.
These, then, are the people who thought that continuing the shutdown and not having a budget were good things, because of "economic freedom, individual liberty, and following the Constitution", which is what Amash says the group is about.
It doesn't matter that the current GOP House caucus is, per DW-Nominate, the most conservative since the 1880's. A sub-group which is even more conservative, more pure, more partisan is needed.
And if the Liberty Caucus becomes dominant? Then the Extra Liberty Caucus will need to be formed, for those members who find the Liberty Caucus wimpy. And on, and on, and on.