What to tell your libertarian friends

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And if you think these guys are principled, think again..

Back in February 2018, I sat down with two leaders of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss, among other things, whether fiscal conservatism had gone extinct. A few days earlier, with encouragement from his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump had signed a budget deal boosting federal spending by nearly $300 billion. I told the leaders, Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, that it seemed precisely the kind of deal that Mulvaney, a self-professed fiscal hawk and a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, would have railed against during his time in Congress. Meadows shrugged. “He wouldn’t have been supportive of it,” the North Carolina congressman told me. But “he’s got a different boss now.”

The Freedom Caucus’s hardening role as Trump’s protector would probably surprise those familiar with the group’s origins. Jordan, Meadows, and others founded the caucus in 2015 as a check on Republican leadership, which they felt had usurped power such that rank-and-file members no longer had a voice in legislative proceedings. Moreover, they were tired of watching Republicans acquiesce to massive spending packages, even as most of them continued to campaign on stemming the deficit. They were effective in quickly building out their ranks, and were soon large enough to block any legislation from passing a GOP-led House. As former Speaker John Boehner and his successor, Paul Ryan, quickly learned, to keep the conference running smoothly was to keep the Freedom Caucus happy.

And that was no small task: Agitation was in the group’s DNA, after all. But in those first years, some variation of conservative principle always seemed to underlie their grievances, whether they were frustrated by a cushy omnibus package or an expansion of guest-worker visas. It seemed natural, then, that so many group members were uncomfortable with Trump during the 2016 presidential race, preferring established conservatives such as Senator Ted Cruz and deficit hawks like Rand Paul. “I don’t think he is a conservative,” the former Idaho representative and Freedom Caucus co-founder Raúl Labrador said of Trump during the primary. Less than a week before the election, Mulvaney—who is now also the president’s acting chief of staff—said he thought Trump was a “terrible human being.”

Justin Amash, Impeachment, and the Freedom Caucus - The Atlantic

[url=https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/justin-amash-impeachment-and-freedom-caucus/590113/][/url]