23/11/2021
The last time the ultra-conservative faction of House Republicans known as the Freedom Caucus elected a leader, Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry hadn’t quite earned his bona fides. Now, fresh off news that he played a key role in Donald Trump’s 2020 coup attempt, Perry is apparently much more qualified for the job.
Perry got elected as the new chairman of the Freedom Caucus this week, inheriting the job created by its founder, a then-North Carolina congressman named Mark Meadows. Yup, that’s the same Mark Meadows who went on to become Trump’s White House chief of staff and who this week refused to comply with a subpoena from the January 6 select committee to tell what he knows about Trump’s coup attempt.
The Freedom Caucus was once the place where 40 or so right-wing lawmakers like Meadows and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan made trouble for GOP leaders, messing with bills over conservative leverage issues like abortion and immigration. They got powerful enough to oust Speaker John Boehner in 2015, and he’s had a few things to say about them since. Today, the Freedom Caucus is Trump’s most loyal power base in Congress, where messianic messengers like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Paul Gosar gather to push lies about a stolen election and to help recast the deadly Jan. 6 riot as a patriotic cause.