For Socialists, Legislative Hardball Has Limits

The Right, as Corey Robin has famously argued, learns from the Left. Edmund Burke argued conservatives should copy the Jacobins. The slaveholders, even as they denounced the rights of man, celebrated the demotic virtues of widespread slaveholding in the antebellum South. Newt Gingrich argued that the conservative minority in the House needed to adopt “Viet Cong” tactics to harry the majority.

More recently, the Left has also attempted to learn from the Right. Liberal activists created the State Innovation Exchange (SIX) as a left-leaning version of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Further left, socialists have argued recently that the left should copy the parliamentary tactics of the congressional far right. Much of this discussion has focused on the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), the right-wing caucus founded in 2015.

All the way back in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself contrasted the unity of the HFC with the much bigger but more loosely organized Congressional Progressive Caucus. In 2020–21, the “force the vote” debate on the Left centered around whether socialists in Congress should, like the HFC, threaten to vote against their party’s Speaker candidate (in this case Nancy Pelosi) unless they received a promise that one of their key legislative priorities (Medicare for All) would be brought to the floor for a vote. More recently, Neal Meyer has argued that the HFC’s success in bullying Kevin McCarthy provides a model for the kind of combativity and cohesion that we should expect from socialist legislators.

I’m not convinced.

In my view, the HFC has been considerably less successful than is generally appreciated, and the costs of its strategy have largely been ignored. Its example for socialist legislators is, therefore, largely (but not entirely) a negative one.

Before getting into the comparison, it’s worth establishing what exactly the House Freedom Caucus is. The caucus was founded in January 2015. The impetus for its founding was the failure of far-right Congressmember Mick Mulvaney to win leadership of the Republican Study Committee (RSC). Founded by New Right impresario Paul Weyrich in the 1970s to pull the party right, by the 1990s the RSC had become a central Republican leadership institution in the House. During Barack Obama’s administration, frustration with the RSC had mounted among the most conservative House Republicans, as the committee tended to support Speaker John Boehner in cutting budgetary compromises with the Obama administration rather than shutting the government down. When Mulvaney lost the RSC leadership contest to Texas energy executive Bill Flores, he and his ideological confreres determined that a new organization was needed for conservatives unwilling to compromise with liberalism.

While the RSC leadership vote was the proximal cause, the founders of the HFC were also reacting against the failure of the House Tea Party Caucus. This caucus had been founded in July 2010 as the organization of the new belligerent right that was then storming Republican primaries. But despite the attention the caucus and its members commanded, by summer 2012 the organization was defunct, having failed, as an organization, to have much influence on anything.

Mulvaney and his comrades, notably Jim Jordan of Ohio and Raul Labrador of Idaho, were determined to avoid a repeat of the Tea Party Caucus. Instead of a group that was publicity-seeking and undisciplined, they wanted a group that would be secretive and highly coordinated. To that end, they shut out House members like Louie Gohmert and Thomas Massie, who, while deeply conservative, had reputations as undisciplined loose cannons. The new caucus would be invitation-only and, unlike most caucuses, would not make its membership public. It would also bind its members by rules like the 80 percent threshold, which held that if 80 percent of the caucus supported a vote, the remaining 20 percent would have to follow.

Very quickly, the caucus became a thorn in Speaker John Boehner’s side, denouncing him and voting against bills like Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding and trade deal authority for the president. Boehner used his power as Speaker to retaliate, removing HFC members from subcommittees and cutting some off from National Republican Congressional Committee funds. In July, Mark Meadows filed a motion to vacate the chair, calling for a vote on Boehner’s speakership in the middle of the term. It was an extraordinary move, the first such motion in nearly a century. In order to avoid a bruising leadership fight that might end in defeat anyways, Boehner announced his retirement. He was replaced by Paul Ryan.

In the 2016 presidential race, the HFC didn’t play much of a role. The group was opposed to Trump, who it correctly saw as totally uncommitted to fiscal conservatism. It was largely divided between Ted Cruz, who had built a strong connection with the HFC, and Rand Paul, whose dogmatic libertarianism appealed to several of the group’s leaders. Though discipline and unity had been the caucus’s founding watchwords, it did not attempt to make a coordinated intervention into the Republican primary.

When Donald Trump became president, the posture of the group shifted considerably. While it continued pushing for far-right priorities, it did not engage in the kind of all-out warfare it had directed against Boehner. Instead, the group often compromised, and when it did fight, it often lost.

On taxes, perhaps the cause closest to the caucus’s heart, there were two priorities in 2017. First, it wanted Trump’s tax cut to be deficit-neutral so it wouldn’t increase the deficit. In this, it was in accordance with the House leadership. Paul Ryan wanted the same thing. But it was opposed to Ryan’s means of paying for it — a border adjustment tax (BAT) that would amount to a huge tax increase on importers. This formed its second priority. Ryan would junk the BAT in summer 2017, though the HFC could hardly claim sole credit. The tax spurred opposition from a huge sector of business, from retailers to the Koch brothers, the latter of which used their connections with the Trump White House to turn the administration against the BAT as well. But with the BAT gone, there was no way to make the tax cut deficit-neutral without huge spending cuts that would derail the entire bill. The HFC pushed for these, but got nowhere, and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed without any compensating spending cuts or new revenue.

The second major fight for the HFC was Obamacare repeal. The caucus wanted a full repeal. Here the HFC did come into serious conflict with the Republican leadership and the Trump administration and was regularly denounced by both. Two members actually left the caucus in the midst of this battle. Paul Ryan had developed a bill, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), that would repeal much of Obamacare but left in place some of the original bill’s new taxes and also offered refundable tax credits to help households purchase health insurance. The HFC refused to support the bill, and lacking the votes to pass it, the House leadership canceled its scheduled vote on it. It subsequently passed amendments that would bring the bill closer in line with what the HFC wanted.

Though it didn’t win all of its demands, the HFC agreed to support the bill. Mark Meadows explained that “had we not come around . . . there would have been the typical stereotype that they’ll never get to ‘yes.’” But even in compromising, the HFC was unable to achieve its demands. The revisions to the bill had made it too conservative for moderate Republicans, who pulled their support, dooming the AHCA once and for all.

When the Democrats took back the House in 2018, the HFC faded in prominence. The reason is simple. To be a minority of a majority is to have some power. But to be a minority of a minority is simply to be powerless. From 2019–2023, the HFC voted basically the same as other Republicans. It joined the fight to defend Donald Trump against impeachment, causing one of its members, Justin Amash, to leave, and also worked to punish Liz Cheney for voting for impeachment after January 6. But neither of these distinguished the HFC from the bulk of House Republicans. When its party was in the minority, the caucus simply did not have very much power.

All of this changed after the GOP took the house back in 2022. As soon as the new Congress came in, the HFC was determined to exercise its power. Though the vote to confirm Kevin McCarthy, who had led the GOP conference since Paul Ryan’s retirement in 2019, would normally have been pro forma, it turned into a bitter struggle between the HFC and McCarthy’s allies. The caucus demanded McCarthy and the conference leadership take up various fights, such as impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and creating a congressional subcommittee on the supposed persecution of January 6 rioters. McCarthy also agreed to give HFC members more committee assignments, to refrain from intervening in primaries without an incumbent, and, most consequentially, to bring back the motion to vacate the chair, which allows a single Republican to initiate a new election for Speaker.

McCarthy’s speakership was hamstrung from the beginning by resistance from the HFC. As he attempted to pass budget bills that Joe Biden was willing to sign and hence avert a government shutdown, the HFC continually denounced him, demanding cuts that would make the bills unacceptable to Biden. As a result, in the spring and the fall McCarthy ended up passing more liberal budgets than he would have preferred, because he had to rely on Democratic votes to pass them. Though the HFC succeeded in weakening McCarthy, its actions made the actual policy outputs of this period more liberal.

In October, the axe fell. HFC member Matt Gaetz filed the motion to vacate, and the House voted 216–210 to remove McCarthy. The race to replace McCarthy was messy. Four candidates tried and failed to win majorities. Mike Johnson, a fourth-term congressmember from Louisiana, finally succeeded after a chaotic three weeks. Though not a member of the HFC, Johnson had attended caucus meetings and received money from the group’s PAC. His election was widely viewed as a triumph for the caucus.

Yet while Johnson was quite friendly to the HFC, for the remainder of Biden’s presidency, the group had little success in shaping policy. The Senate still held a slim Democratic majority, so any bill the House hoped to pass needed to be acceptable to Chuck Schumer. When Johnson pushed through appropriations bills that did little to advance HFC priorities, caucus members wailed and gnashed their teeth but could not change the legislation and would not try to remove Johnson over the betrayal.

The Republicans’ victory in the 2024 elections returned the party to unified control over the federal government. The margin in the House, however, was quite small. As such, it might be expected that the HFC would yield disproportionate power in this environment. However, the reality has been rather different. As political scientist Frances Lee has shown, “During the first seven months of 2025, the HFC collapsed as a distinct voting bloc in the House Republican conference.” When Trump wanted to pass a continuing resolution that sustained spending levels appropriated under Biden, the HFC unanimously supported him, despite some complaint. Similarly, when Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill failed to include spending cuts savage enough to offset its tax cuts, the HFC released a document criticizing the bill, and five members voted against a rule to proceed. But when Johnson continued pushing it, the HFC folded and unanimously voted for the bill it had just described as “morally and fiscally bankrupt.”

As the 2026 midterms approach, the situation of the HFC has deteriorated even further. Almost the entire leadership is leaving the House. In the statehouses, where local franchises of the HFC have been set up, it is losing ground. Wyoming had been its most successful state. The caucus had won majority control of the statehouse in 2024 and announced an ambitious legislative agenda. But after it failed to pass most of it, its reputation sank. In the primaries this week, the caucus lost thirteen members in the House and six in the Senate.

To sum up, as of this writing, the future of the House Freedom Caucus is uncertain. It does not exist as a distinct voting bloc anymore, and its leaders are departing. If, as seems likely, the Democrats win control of the House in November, its power will be diminished even further, as it returns to the status of a minority of a minority.

Where does all of this leave the argument that socialists in office should emulate the caucus’s practice of what Matthew Green has called “legislative hardball”? In my view, there are three things that stand out as particularly relevant from the experience of the HFC.

First, the returns to legislative hardball are highest when the caucus is a minority of a majority and particularly when there is an opposite-party president. In these situations, the caucus could use its size and discipline to compel the House leadership to enter into fights with the administration that it otherwise would have avoided. These were also the situations in which the caucus succeeded in winning more power for itself in the form of committee apointments and so on.

When the caucus was a minority of a minority, it was effectively powerless and indistinguishable from the rest of its party. When a party majority was combined with a same-party president, the caucus often made noise and complained about policies being made but was generally unsuccessful in shaping the policy outputs.

Second, the caucus’s actions often resulted in policy moving the opposite direction from what it preferred. Its obstructionism led its party leadership to look for votes on the other side of the aisle in some circumstances. Since some compromises had to be made in order to attract these votes, the resulting legislation was more liberal than it would have been if the caucus had simply supported it. Recalcitrance can have real costs.

Finally, the HFC’s accomplishments have fallen far short of its ambitions. HFC members hoped that its work would build the caucus into a kind of third party in American politics (effectively a right-wing version of the party surrogate model that is popular in the Democratic Socialists of America). This has plainly failed. The caucus has failed to sustain itself as an independent voice in Congress and is deteriorating institutionally as well. The very tactics that gave it its power are in large part responsible for this deterioration. The caucus gained a reputation as obstructionists and is unpopular with much of the rest of the party.

There are a few implications for socialists in office. On the positive side, the conditions in which socialist legislative hardball are most likely to be successful are those in which the Democratic Party has a majority in Congress and an opposite-party president. This is the situation that will likely obtain after the midterms. Given that, I think it makes sense to look for some opportunities for the new socialist bloc in Congress to throw its weight around. However, it is worth saying that socialists in Congress do not have the kind of organizational coherence the HFC operated with. They do not have an official caucus or any institutional means of cooperating. Building this should be a priority.

On the whole, however, I think the experience of the HFC should lead socialists to be cautious about legislative hardball as a general stance. The risks are very high. A socialist caucus that rejects legislation as not left-wing enough, only to lead the House leadership to look to pass it with Republican votes instead, is not accomplishing very much for the cause of socialism. And obstructionism within the party can actually isolate a caucus instead of winning a leading role for it.

In other words, I’m afraid the lessons of the House Freedom Caucus for socialists are fairly limited. This is a pity, because the task in which socialist legislators are now engaged, as members of a party they do not lead, is a tremendously difficult one in which there are few models from which to learn. But the experience of the HFC does at least provide some guidance as to the risks of following its example.