In Wyoming, a far-right faction of GOP state legislators split with the rest of the party this year in unsuccessfully fighting to prevent the families of police officers killed while on duty from receiving an increase in death benefits — from 60% to 90% of the officer’s salary — because it cost too much. This is in a state where a total of 62 officers have died in the line of duty since 1877.
In Idaho, members of its Freedom Caucus ousted the Republican House Majority Leader in February for being insufficiently conservative.
In Missouri, five GOP members of the state legislature filibustered the state Senate earlier this month in an unsuccessful attempt to defund the state’s Medicaid program. In fact, this year the Freedom Caucus there held up so much legislation with procedural ploys that the nonpartisan Missouri Independent, which reports on state government, called the legislative session the least productive in decades.
These far-right Republican state legislative groups are affiliates of the State Freedom Caucus Network (SFCN), and play the same confrontational and obstructionist role as the U.S. House Freedom Caucus (HFC). That congressional group regularly derails the passage of critical bills on everything from immigration reform to national security and government spending, often bringing the federal government to the brink of a shutdown.
Like the HFC, the state caucuses represent an extreme Right faction of the already MAGA-dominated Republican Party that uses procedural measures in state legislatures to advance their culture war agenda.
“In every state where they appear, Freedom caucuses cause headaches for the so-called establishment Republicans in charge,” according to a recent piece in Governing. SFCN lists 11 states with caucuses, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming, and until recently, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) tracked active caucuses in Mississippi and Nevada.
“The influence of each caucus varies by state,” the Governing article points out. “In blue states such as Illinois, they can make noise but remain fairly toothless as a minority within a minority. In Arizona, where Republicans hold narrow majorities in both chambers, the caucus makes up a key voting bloc.”
Meadows Still Messing with the Mainstream
Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, has been instrumental in establishing these state caucuses. As a congressman, he helped found the HFC in 2015, and as a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) he formed the SFCN in order to build caucuses of state legislators whose loyalty lies with CPI over the Republican Party.
“Building Freedom caucuses in every state, composed of principled, America-First conservatives, will help better protect our liberties and American values in communities nationwide” and give state legislators “the tools and resources they need to mirror the success of the House Freedom Caucus,” CPI noted in launching SFPN in December 2021. It pointed to issues such as “election integrity, critical race theory, school choice, vaccine mandates, and police reform” in contending that “our nation’s most important battles are taking place in state legislatures.”
Meadows is currently under indictment in Arizona and Georgia for his role in illegally seeking to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. In 2021, the U.S. House voted to hold him in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, but since then he appears to have struck a deal with the Department of Justice that kept him from being indicted in the federal election interference case against Trump.
In many states that are part of the network, legislators do not have their own staff, so SFCN provides not only a right-wing legislative playbook but also staffing. The national organization also pays the salary of each SFCN state director, none of whom is a legislator.
While the SCFN is a non-tax-exempt 501(c)(4) political advocacy group that focuses on legislation, it also has a foundation, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) group set up to receive tax-exempt donations, and a super PAC: State Freedom Caucus Action.
The SFCN raised $1.1 million in 2022, the first full year it was in operation, and the foundation raised $616,617, while the PAC brought in less than $1,000 in the first quarter of 2024. There is no publicly available information about the network’s funders in 2022, but three-quarters of the funding for the foundation ($463,748) came from CPI, and a group associated with Leonard Leo, Consumers’ Research, pitched in another $100,000. The group is a major player in the Right’s manufactured crisis around “woke capitalism” and “sustainable investing.”
The president of SFCN is Andrew Roth, previously with the conservative Club for Growth, who says that the “business model” for the state caucuses comes from the HFC. “What we try to do is push conservative policy,” Roth told the South Carolina Daily Gazette. “If we win, we win. If we lose, we’re exposing the fake Republicans for who they are. They will then have to answer to their constituents. We feel like we win either way.”
The group’s vice president for government affairs, Justin Ouimette, formerly served as executive director of the HFC. Both leaders draw roughly half of their salary from the foundation.
GOP Resistance
Republican leadership in these states is beginning to push back. In Wyoming, Speaker of the House Albert Sommers penned an angry op-ed in May 2023 asking, “why does the Freedom Caucus pander to a national agenda, instead of seeking Wyoming solutions to Wyoming problems?” That caucus went on to kill a third of the bills introduced at the start of the 2024 legislative session.
In Missouri, the Senate president pro tem stripped five Freedom Caucus members of their committee chairmanships because of their constant use of stalling tactics.
For the past year in South Carolina, state Freedom Caucus members who unsuccessfully backed candidates in primaries against incumbent Republican legislators are excluded from the key decision-making gathering of the state House GOP. “Few states have experienced as much intraparty turmoil as South Carolina, where state Freedom Caucus members and more mainstream GOP leaders have clashed over a wide variety of issues, leading to litigation and sparking numerous primary challenges,” Politico reports.
Meanwhile, in Georgia the Senate Republican caucus booted an outspoken Freedom Caucus member who tried to pressure colleagues into impeaching Fani Willis, the Democratic attorney general in Fulton County, for indicting Trump for election interference.
In Illinois, SFCN Illinois State Director Collin Mosely created talking points against a bill sponsored by Rep. Chris Miller (R-IL-101) that would keep state funding for schools that don’t provide gender neutral spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms. Mosely also prepared remarks for Rep. Blaine Wilhour (R-IL-110) when he spoke at an anti-immigration media event organized by the Freedom Caucus, according to emails obtained by CMD. While state caucuses have had some success in disrupting the legislative process, they have mostly had only modest wins in their ongoing culture war. SFCN offers states a program that includes legislation to oppose teaching critical race theory in the public schools even though few places teach it as is. SFCN also opposes state programs that provide for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at state-funded institutions. Many of the state caucuses oppose any tax increases, including those meant to help fund public education.
This year, the Idaho Freedom Caucus backed legislation to ensure that every public school student is taught civics, but that was already mandated as a condition of high school graduation in the state. The caucus there also pushed a law to prevent municipalities from passing legislation to provide for guaranteed income programs, although in state Senate hearings Freedom Caucus sponsors could not point to any such proposals being discussed by any affected local government.
In addition, Idaho passed a law to revoke the driver’s licenses of what the bill called “illegal aliens.” Again, the Freedom Caucus pushed a solution to which there was never a problem since Idaho does not provide driver’s licenses to undocumented residents.
In Georgia, the Freedom Caucus crowed that it had stopped a bill in the state Senate to create a state-level Green New Deal even though that bill actually funded programs to enable the state to meet its mandated renewable energy goals.
Like the HFC, the state caucuses view themselves as representing a third party, but it remains to be seen if they can build a separate grassroots base within their state Republican parties. The problem they face is that almost all other Republicans in these state legislatures support Trump, and the state and county parties (which also support the former president) have their own membership drives and raise money for elections from Trump voters and others.
Early signs indicate that the groups may have grander political ambitions such as running candidates in primaries, which has already happened without success in Missouri. The South Dakota group and SFCN have established their own PACs and are likely to make endorsements. Regardless, like their counterpart in the U.S. House, the state caucuses are good at gaining media attention and stoking the fires of the culture wars.
David Armiak contributed research to this report.
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