Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), the anti-Trump current chairman of the House Freedom Caucus who is facing a primary challenge in Virginia from a pro-Trump state senator, this week circulated serious rule changes to the bylaws of the House Freedom Caucus that would take the group in a decidedly different direction than its original intent at founding.
Multiple sources from Freedom Caucus offices familiar with what Good circulated regarding proposed changes to the House Freedom Caucus bylaws are alarmed by what the chairman put in a document and gave to other members. They are concerned that what Good may be doing is designed to consolidate his own power and veer away from the Freedom Caucus’s original mission of advancing a conservative agenda. The sources who spoke with Breitbart News described the contents of the document, but did not provide an actual document out of fear that Good deliberately made alternative versions of the proposal document to be able to identify possible leaks — like this — of the alleged power-grab.
Four major rule changes are in the proposal Good sent to other Freedom Caucus members. First and foremost, the proposal seeks to ban any committee chairs in the full House of Representatives from serving as voting members of the Freedom Caucus. It is unclear if this proposal would also apply to subcommittee chairs, but there are two full committee chairs—Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs Judiciary, and Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), who chairs Homeland Security—who are members of the Freedom Caucus currently.
Jordan was also the founding chairman of the group more than a decade ago back in 2013, when then Speaker John Boehner was working with then-President Barack Obama and other Democrats against the wishes of conservatives and Republicans. Boehner would eventually lose his Speakership two years later in the fall of 2015, when then-future Freedom Caucus chairman and now former White House chief of staff, then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), first popularized the “motion to vacate the chair” technique. While Meadows never called a vote on his motion, his introduction of it electrified the nation and consolidated enough GOP opposition to Boehner to force him to resign. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) would years later employ a similar tactic against now former Speaker Kevin McCarthy when he actually forced a vote on his motion to vacate the chair, which led to McCarthy’s ouster. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) then most recently forced a vote on a motion to vacate the chair of current House Speaker Mike Johnson, but the effort was thwarted by the Democrats who voted to save Johnson’s speakership. Johnson did not have enough Republican votes to keep his job with just Republicans, and relied on House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to save his job for him.
Stripping people like Jordan and Green of Freedom Caucus voting privileges because they are full House committee chairs is a drastic departure from the intent of the founders of the group at the formation of the Freedom Caucus, who sought to increase the members’ power and influence by winning plum committee assignments and appointments as chairs of committees and subcommittees. In fact, a big part of why the Freedom Caucus even formed to begin with was that Boehner was stripping conservatives of committee assignments in late 2012—and a big part of why Meadows even proceeded with the effort to oust Boehner was because Boehner stripped him of a subcommittee chairmanship because Meadows had voted against a rule on the floor of the House.
While that in and of itself would represent a major change for the Freedom Caucus, the proposal Good sent to other members also includes a provision that would allow a chairman at any time the power to publicly reveal membership in the Freedom Caucus or even a full list of members. This would be another serious change to the organization, as members like Jordan and Meadows in its founding deliberately kept membership private and secret unless any member wished to publicly identify themselves as a member of the House Freedom Caucus. These secrecy provisions, they made clear many times, were important because some members who agreed with the mission of the Freedom Caucus and with advancing conservative causes wished to remain anonymous with regard to their membership to avoid pressures from leadership in Congress or from any other untoward outside forces that could get in the way of success in advancing that conservative agenda.
A third change in the proposal Good sent around would make it easier for the chairman to kick any Freedom Caucus members out of the organization by including “virtual meetings” in the list of those that have required attendance. Currently, members of the Freedom Caucus can miss only three meetings of the group without an “excused absence” before they could be considered for removal—this proposal would change that to include “virtual meetings.” This is another significant change and one that Freedom Caucus offices familiar with Good’s proposal expressed real hesitation about to Breitbart News, especially given the move last year by the organization to expel Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. The group expelled her because she disagreed with some members on their approach to handling disagreements with leadership.
A fourth change contained in the proposal Good circulated seeks to increase the amount of money members need to pay out of their Members’ Representational Allowance (MRA) as dues to the Freedom Caucus. Every elected member of Congress gets a certain amount of taxpayer money allowed to their office called an MRA, which can be used for things like paying dues to groups like the Freedom Caucus as well as more general operating expenses of representation. Groups like the Freedom Caucus use the dues collected from members’ MRAs to turn around and hire staffers as shared staffers.
Good’s spokesman, current Freedom Caucus communications director Harry Fones, is one of such staffers. Fones, when asked for comment from Breitbart News on this matter, provided a joint statement on record from Reps. Andy Ogles (R-TN), Andy Harris (R-MD), and Michael Cloud (R-TX)—the members of the Freedom Caucus Committee on Bylaws—who said they drafted the proposal that Good circulated to members. They did not disagree with any of the specific proposed changes detailed above, but did argue that the changes in the proposal Good circulated were not in contravention of the original intent of the founding of the Freedom Caucus, even though they say the group’s bylaws have not been changed in any significant way since back in 2015.
“While HFC does not typically comment on internal matters, the claims of anonymous sources are so inaccurate that we want to set the record straight,” Ogles, Harris, and Cloud said in the joint statement. “The House Freedom Caucus Board of Directors appointed us to a ‘Committee on Bylaws’ to update the rules that govern our group, which have not been substantially updated since 2015. The Board unanimously approved sharing our recommendations to the full group, and we look forward to a discussion with the HFC Membership. Any claims that this process veers from the founding principles of the House Freedom Caucus or that this is an effort to consolidate power are preposterous. This is internal housekeeping to make the House Freedom Caucus an even more effective group in the fight to protect our conservative values and the Constitution.”
Good, who assumed the chairmanship of the Freedom Caucus this year, last year endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over former President Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primary. He did so on the day Trump was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, before DeSantis was even in the race. That was not the only anti-Trump move that Good made throughout the year. He was also caught on camera ripping Trump, and regularly criticized the former president to the point where Trump’s top adviser Chris LaCivita became an outspoken backer of Virginia State Sen. John McGuire over Good. While Trump himself has not yet endorsed in the race, and it is unclear whether he will do so, McGuire was in Trump’s motorcade earlier this month when Trump rode to his trial in New York. Good, who has since tried to come off as not anti-Trump, appeared alongside several congressional colleagues there outside the courthouse on the same day.
McGuire, in a recent Breitbart News Saturday interview, called Good a “backstabbing Never Trumper.”
“So yes, I call him a Never Trumper. Let’s fast forward to 2022…he begged Trump for an endorsement. And then when the chips are down, and, you know, when the chips are down, that’s how you find out who your allies are. When the chips were down, and Trump got indicted for this ridiculous case he’s going through right now, this week, that’s the day he endorsed DeSantis,” McGuire said, adding that Good spent “eight months going around the district saying that Trump wasn’t pro-life, wasn’t pro-gun, wasn’t a conservative, and saying that he is the only man that could lose to Biden.”
While these proposed rule changes that Good sent to Freedom Caucus offices are currently just that—a proposal—some conservatives fear he may call a meeting and jam them through quickly. The bylaws can be changed at any Freedom Caucus meeting with two-thirds support, and if Good calls a quick meeting he might be able to do it right there on short notice.