 | BY PEDER SCHAEFER | | 
With a demonstrator standing in the background, House Freedom Caucus members (left to right) Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) and Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) talk to reporters on May 30, 2023. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | LIVE FREEDOM CAUCUS OR DIE — Since its founding in 2015, the hardline House Freedom Caucus has been a polarizing presence, using confrontational and obstructionist tactics to push Congress, and the Republican Party, to the right on a variety of issues. In the process, the group ousted a Republican House speaker and became a far-right conservative power center of its own. But it’s come at considerable cost to the House as a legislative body, and created an even more factionalized and dysfunctional chamber. Now, those same issues are surfacing in statehouses across the nation where in recent years the Freedom Caucus has exported its model. Many of the 11 legislatures with state-based Freedom Caucuses have seen their Republican majorities splinter and descend into bitter conflict with the application of the Congress-honed tactics. “It’s the same kind of battles that are going on with the Freedom Caucus in Washington D.C.,” said South Carolina state Rep. Jay Kilmartin, who has been a member of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus since 2022. “We ran because we got frustrated with what we were getting out of our state Republican Party for so long.” Few states have experienced as much intra-party 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. Freedom Caucus members have used the state budgeting process to bring up social issues like diversity initiatives within universities, spoken out against what they call government handouts to private companies and pushed for more restrictive bans on gender-affirming care. “They are a ‘let’s govern by bumper sticker’ entity,” said South Carolina state Rep. Micah Caskey, a Republican who is an outspoken critic of the caucus. “I have a general contempt for what I see as the lack of integrity and honesty with which they approach legislating.” Freedom Caucus-aligned legislators who spoke with Nightly said that their support came from grassroots activists, but they also receive significant help from the State Freedom Caucus Network , a D.C.-based group that is helping the upstart caucuses go toe-to-toe with the established GOP order. The network pays the salaries of state directors who help legislators read bills, do policy analysis and act as a kind of connective tissue for ideologically similar lawmakers across the nation. That organization launched in December of 2021 in connection with the Conservative Partnership Institute, a rapidly growing conservative group tied to former Donald Trump chief of staff and Freedom Caucus co-founder Mark Meadows . Andy Roth, the network’s president, said that the idea for the network came from state lawmakers who were interested in pursuing the “business model” of the D.C.-based House Freedom Caucus in their own states. Roth said the eventual goal for the group is to have Freedom Caucuses in all 50 states. “State lawmakers are often part time, they don’t have an office, and they have very little when it comes to support to help read bills and do policy analysis,” Roth said. “We basically just provide another set of eyes and ears to help these lawmakers.” The effect, however, has been to sow the seeds of division in places like Wyoming and Missouri, where there’s already bad blood with a Freedom Caucus outpost that was only officially formed in January. Missouri Republican leaders were so frustrated by the caucus’ tactics that they stripped members of committee assignments and even certain choice parking spots . “The year started off with the Freedom Caucus being attacked before we even stepped foot in the building,” said Freedom Caucus member state Sen. Nick Schroer. Schroer was the one behind an attention-grabbing draft rule change in January that would have permitted dueling between state lawmakers to settle disputes. He said that he circulated the rule to make a point about the incivility that had taken over the chamber. Caskey, the South Carolina Republican, laments that the Freedom Caucus tactics are stunts that, in the end, don’t enable lawmakers to pass more conservative legislation. “They are an emotional annoyance and a nuisance more than anything,” he said. “But they all stay on message, and that has allowed their insurgency to metastasize.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at pschaefer@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @p_s_schaefer .
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| | SUBSCRIBE TO GLOBAL PLAYBOOK: Don’t miss out on POLITICO’s Global Playbook, the newsletter taking you inside pivotal discussions at the most influential gatherings in the world, including WEF in Davos, Milken Global in Beverly Hills, to UNGA in NYC and many more. Suzanne Lynch delivers the world's elite and influential moments directly to you. Stay in the global loop. SUBSCRIBE NOW . | | | | | | | — Biden may condition aid for Israel after a Rafah invasion: President Joe Biden will consider conditioning military aid to Israel if the country moves forward with a large-scale invasion of Rafah , according to four U.S. officials with knowledge of internal administration thinking. Biden’s openness to taking this step reflects the extreme strains in his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rejected subtler efforts by the Biden administration to rein in his conduct of the war with Hamas. While Biden has not made any decision on limiting future weapons transfers, officials said that he very well might do so if Israel launches a new operation that further imperils Palestinian civilians. — Peter Navarro ordered to prison on March 19: Former Trump White House aide Peter Navarro has been ordered to report to a Miami prison on March 19 to begin serving a four month sentence for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee. Navarro, who is urging a federal appeals court to stay the sentence while he attempts to overturn his conviction, faces the prospect of becoming the first top adviser to Donald Trump to serve jail time for an offense related to the effort to subvert the 2020 election. — Marcia Fudge, Biden’s housing secretary, is stepping down: Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge is stepping down next week , according to an email she wrote to staff today. Fudge’s retirement represents a surprising departure from President Joe Biden’s otherwise stable Cabinet just eight months before the election. It also comes just days after White House chief of staff Jeff Zients told POLITICO Playbook that the Cabinet has “people who are committed to this president.” — Pentagon needs Congress to hand over $10B to replace weapons sent to Ukraine: The Pentagon has sent $10 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine that it still does not have the money to replace due to congressional gridlock , according to a top Defense Department official. DOD officials expect funding to replenish the equipment the U.S. has already sent to Ukraine to be included in President Joe Biden’s supplemental request, which provides billions of additional dollars in aid for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. But that legislation has languished on Capitol Hill for months amid partisan bickering.
| | STAFF SLASHED — Donald Trump’s newly installed leadership team at the Republican National Committee today began the process of pushing out dozens of officials , according to two people close to the Trump campaign and the RNC, POLITICO reports. All told, the expectation is that more than 60 RNC staffers who work across the political, communications and data departments will be let go. Those being asked to resign include five members of the senior staff, though the names were not made public. Additionally, some vendor contracts are expected to be cut. FEELING TOXIC — Within President Joe Biden’s advance team — the network of White House and campaign aides tasked with coordinating, designing and staging his public speeches and events across the country — there’s serious concern about the current direction of the office , according to interviews with 18 current and former White House staffers and people who have worked directly with it, POLITICO reports. The culture within the office has gotten so bad that the White House Counsel’s Office opened an investigation, according to three people who were contacted last fall by the office for interviews. Specifically, they said, investigators looked into complaints of verbal harassment by Ian Mellul, the former associate director of presidential advance. Mellul resigned March 1 after a months-long investigation, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.
PECKER TESTIFIED TO THE GRAND JURY ABOUT
ALL OF THE CATCH & KILL STORIES HE PAID FOR -
PAID A FINE, TESTIFIED WITH IMMUNITY...WHO
WOULD WANT THAT TO BE PUBLIC?
tRUMP SHOULD HAVE PAID A FINE & SETTLE THE
CASE! IMMUNITY CLAIM — Former President Donald Trump made a last-ditch bid to postpone his upcoming criminal trial in Manhattan until after the Supreme Court decides his bid for “presidential immunity” in one of his other criminal cases. Trump has argued for broad immunity in his federal election-subversion case, and in a new court filing, he said those immunity claims should also bar prosecutors in the Manhattan case from using some of the evidence they intend to introduce at trial. HUSH MONEY TRIAL TRUMP ON TIKTOK — Donald Trump said today that he still believes TikTok poses a national security risk but is opposed to banning the hugely popular app because doing so would help its rival, Facebook , which he continues to lambast over his 2020 election loss, reports the Associated Press.. Trump, in a call-in interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” was asked about his comments last week that seemed to voice opposition to a bill being advanced by Congress that would effectively ban TikTok and other ByteDance apps from the Apple and Google app stores as well as U.S. web hosting services. RETURN TO NEW HAMPSHIRE — President Joe Biden highlighted and hit back against comments from former President Donald Trump today suggesting openness to entitlement reform, vowing to a largely retirement age crowd in New Hampshire that he would block any efforts to cut Medicare or Social Security , reports CNN. On a visit to New Hampshire, a state with one of the country’s oldest populations, Biden outlined a health care agenda that he says contrasts sharply with Republicans, who have pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and eliminate caps on out-of-pocket drug costs.
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Chega party leader Andre Ventura addresses supporters at the Marriott Hotel in Lisbon on Sunday. | Andre Dias Nobre/AFP via Getty Images | THE RIGHT STUFF — Portugal’s far right is once again set to play a decisive role in the country’s political future , POLITICO EU reports. Sunday’s national elections were won by the center-right Democratic Alliance coalition, but the group and its allied parties failed to secure a governing majority of seats in the parliament. So too did outgoing Prime Minister António Costa’s Socialist Party, which conceded the election admitting that it would be unable to secure the seats needed to form a governing alliance with the far left. The inconclusive results create an atmosphere in which the far-right Chega party is poised to wield a remarkable amount of power. The anti-establishment group, which has appropriated the slogan of the authoritarian party that governed Portugal 50 years ago, Estado Novo’s “God, country, family and work,” has consolidated itself as Portugal’s third-largest political force and now controls at least 48 of the 230 seats in the parliament. While all of the other parties in the parliament have vowed not to work with the far-right party, it’s unclear how legislation will get passed without it. On Sunday, Pedro Nuno Santos, Costa’s successor as socialist leader, said he would not block Democratic Alliance leader Luís Montenegro’s bid to form a government, but that he also won’t help him pass bills. That raises questions about Portugal’s governability. If the center right can’t get support from across the aisle, how long will it be able to rebuff an alliance with Chega, which campaigned on an anti-corruption platform? And how long can the parliament realistically exclude a group that was backed by nearly one in 10 eligible voters? ROYAL MALPRACTICE — Britain’s royal family is learning the hard way about navigating the AI-driven world of deepfakes , POLITICO EU reports. Kate Middleton, wife of the heir to the British throne Prince William, was forced to publicly apologize today for the clumsy editing of a family photograph she released over the weekend. Ironically, the Mother’s Day snap had been released — in part — to quell a surge of online conspiracy theories about the whereabouts and wellbeing of Kate, who is yet to make a public appearance after spending two weeks in hospital in January for an unspecified medical condition. But the move backfired spectacularly when online commentators immediately spotted the image of the princess and her children had been doctored prior to release. International picture agencies refused to use the photo after confirming the image had been manipulated. The subsequent furor only added fuel to the fire for the online conspiracists — and sent trust in the British establishment plummeting even lower.
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| | | IN THE CHEAP SEATS — The Oscars are “like nesting tables of more than 3,000 progressively less famous people going all the way up to heaven,” writes Stuart Heritage , who was inside the Dolby Theater for the show on Sunday night. But his experience was quite different from the famous people in the first few rows. He was in the balcony with the not so famous, which includes journalists, family members or people who won an online giveaway. The funny secret, though, is that the people in the cheap seats are often much more interested in the show than those down below. Read the full scene report on the other side of the Oscars for The Guardian.
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On this date in 1938: Sympathizers of the Nazi regime crowd the streets of Vienna to welcome the conquering Adolf Hitler who merged Germany and Austria in a bloodless coup. | AP | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here . | |
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