In a nutshell, the “Freedom Caucus” in the U.S. House of Representatives consists of people who think Speaker Paul Ryan isn’t conservative enough. Anyone who has examined the publicly proclaimed policy positions—in particular on economic and budgetary issues—that Ryan has put forth understands exactly how extreme such a position is.
These right-wingers have sought to make life difficult for Ryan, just as they did for his predecessor John Boehner, throughout his time as speaker. After Election Day, assuming Trump loses, they are planning to make Ryan’s life even harder as payback for how the speaker has essentially ignored his party’s nominee after the “grab them by the pussy” tapes came out. The Freedom Caucus apparently wants to block Ryan from being re-elected as speaker—if the Republicans maintain their House majority, that is. Trump, for his part, has publicly hammered Ryan in recent weeks, and has privately made clear his belief that Ryan should be punished for his lack of support.
As one prominent Freedom Caucus member, North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, said recently: “A lot of people who believe so desperately that we need to put Donald Trump in the White House—they question the loyalty of the speaker.” Virginia Rep. Dave Brat similarly offered: “There’s a huge chunk of people who want to see a fight taken to D.C.,” and added: “leadership comes and smacks our guy? That’s where you’re going to put down a marker? Really? And the American people are just scratching their head saying, ‘Really? That’s rich.’”
But what exactly does this coming battle in the House mean for congressional Republicans, and, more importantly, what does it say about the Freedom Caucus’s priorities—the things they supposedly believe in and want to make law?
Where does the Freedom Caucus (and, within it, the harshest of Ryan’s critics in the House) stand in terms of policy and ideology? Take a look at the list of questions—demands, really—the Freedom Caucus asked of candidates for the speakership a year ago, when Ryan was about to be elected to that position. In terms of actual policy (much of the list dealt with how things would work in the House), the most consequential section called for “structural entitlement reforms.”
More broadly, when House right-wingers have stood against Ryan it has been when they think he’s spending too much. For example, in March, 30 out of 40 Freedom Caucus members voted against the budget proposed by their own party’s leadership for exactly that reason. This vote positioned them to Ryan’s right on spending and entitlements.
But what about where Trump stands compared to Ryan on actual policy? On the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), yes, Trump and the Freedom Caucus appear simpatico, as Trump has opposed TPP, and the caucus members voted against granting the president fast-track authority to negotiate trade deals, including TPP, in June 2015. Even that vote, however, wasn’t really about policy, as Ryan Lizza explained in the New Yorker: “Despite the Freedom Caucus’s support for free trade, it opposed the bill, mostly on the ground that it would cede congressional power to the President.” That’s how these right-wingers think: If Obama likes something, it must be bad.
In Congress, especially the House, real policy substance centers on the budget. So let’s look at Speaker Ryan’s budget and spending ideas. He has proposed on numerous occasions to gut Medicare, and did so again in the 2016 budget proposal he released this spring. He doesn’t exactly advertise that’s what he’s doing, but, in reality, he is:
Ryan’s new Medicare proposal hews to the same basic structure as his previous premium support plans — in essence, a system of insurance vouchers. Under the plan, future Medicare beneficiaries would have the option of choosing between traditional fee-for-service Medicare or a list of private health plans and receive a subsidy to help pay the chosen policy’s premium. Unlike previous Ryan budgets, however, seniors who are currently 55 or younger would be forced into this alternative system, likely breaking a pledge House Republicans made last year promising that current 55-year-olds would be able to stay on traditional Medicare.
Ryan emphasizes that his proposal still gives seniors the choice of remaining in regular Medicare. But what he doesn’t mention is that his plan makes Medicare so expensive that millions of seniors will likely be forced to switch into the private plans. While Ryan employs a different type of bidding system for private health plans under his 2015 blueprint that softens his plan’s topline effect on beneficiaries’ costs, an earlier Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of Medicare premium support systems found that plans such as Ryan’s would increase traditional Medicare premiums by a staggering 50 percent.
What about Social Security? Ryan wants to slash Social Security benefits as well. Let’s compare this to Trump. Actually, it’s not so easy. On the one hand, he has criticized Ryan for having proposed to cut benefits and hike the minimum age to receive them. On the other, the GOP’s 2016 platform turned out to be much closer to Ryan than Trump on entitlements. As for Trump himself, although he has promised repeatedly not to cut benefits, one of his economic advisors walked that promise back:
Similarly, Trump policy adviser Sam Clovis recently said at the 2016 Fiscal Summit of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation: “After the administration has been in place, then we will start to look at all of the programs, including entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.” At that point, Clovis added, “We’ll start taking a hard look at those to start seeing what we can do in a bipartisan way,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
Few are misguided enough to trust Donald Trump with Social Security and Medicare. Hell, he can’t be trusted to pay employees and contractors after they work for him. Still, if you’re a Freedom Caucus member, and you claim to be to the right of Paul Ryan on spending and budgetary matters—bearing in mind that Social Security and Medicare alone represent 40 percent of the federal budget—one would think that you’d recognize Ryan as light years better than Donald Trump. What does it tell us when that does not appear to be the case?
First, unsurprisingly, support for Trump isn’t really about policy, especially for hard-right, supposedly small government-loving conservatives. Support for small government, just like support for so-called states’ rights, has always been connected to a desire to make sure that government doesn’t do too much for “those people.”
That’s why the tea party—in theory devoted to lower taxes and cutting spending—wanted nothing to do with trimming Social Security and Medicare benefits, which disproportionately benefit white people (as opposed to, say, Medicaid and food stamps). This sounds a lot like the position Trump, who isn’t exactly a doctrinaire Ayn Rand conservative like Paul Ryan, takes—in front of big crowds at least.
To clarify, Paul Ryan is no moderate. The bar for what it means to be a Republican moderate has moved so far to the right in the past two decades that people now see Bob Dole as one, or at least as a “reasonable Republican.” How crazy is that? Dole not only voted against Medicare in 1965, he bragged about doing so. In 1996, no less. Some moderate.
Those House Republicans who say they are more conservative than Paul Ryan, but who choose Trump over Ryan—Congressmen who, thanks to the way their districts are drawn, have nothing to fear from their constituents other than being seen as not right-wing enough—make one thing perfectly clear. When you get down to it, conservatism’s fundamental principles aren’t built around budgets and spending: instead, they center on peddling racial fear and preying on racial anxieties.
That’s why Trump comes first.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).