Sitting in a room on the fourth floor of the Cannon House Office Building, sipping soda and beer minutes after they helped defeat a three-week extension of Homeland Security funding, the roughly two dozen House conservatives who in January declared themselves the Freedom Caucus were looking to flex their muscles again.

They made the House Republican leaders an offer — a one-week funding bill, with the option for another two weeks if formal negotiations with the Senate were launched. After breaking for dinner, and scrolling through news on their iPhones and BlackBerrys, the group walked together back to the House floor to watch leadership’s machinations firsthand.


Ultimately, the House leaders rejected the offer from the Freedom Caucus and, in a further rebuke, eventually gave in to Democratic demands for a floor vote on a bill funding DHS through September. But that defeat looked almost like a victory to many members of the Freedom Caucus, who insist they have established themselves as a unified force. They didn’t try to oust Speaker John Boehner, as some in Boehner’s circle feared, but came away prepared to be a constant counterweight to the embattled speaker.

“While yesterday we might have lost a major battle, I think that tactically, our strength is growing very quickly,” Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) said. “The number of people who want to join our ranks is increasing every day.”

Salmon and other members of the Freedom Caucus made clear that their purpose isn’t simply endless debate. For years, the nucleus of conservative thought in the House has been the Republican Study Committee, which holds meetings that are large and ideologically diverse. The group has been risk-averse, hardly ever unifying behind a legislative strategy.

The Freedom Caucus was a response to that, and in the midst of their first legislative battle over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, they showed just how different they’d be. Since Republicans took the majority in 2011, the far right wing of the House Republican Conference has been a disparate bunch, unable to clearly articulate a unified set of demands to the leadership.

That all seems to have changed this week.

Although they clearly lost the fight over DHS funding, the Freedom Caucus is beginning to show that it is a force that requires leadership’s attention. The group is showing legislative sophistication, defying the perception of a ragtag collection of demagogues as many in the Capitol had pegged it.

The group, along with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), were able to slow consideration of the Senate’s DHS bill using rarely employed floor tactics — a strategy born of consultations with parliamentary advisers that lasted more than a week, sources said. They successfully worked to whip up opposition to Republican leadership’s plans, dealing Boehner and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) an embarrassing defeat on the House floor.

With the backing of popular conservatives, they have changed the definition of what legislation meets conservative muster. Those new standards have grown the group’s reach beyond its approximately two dozen members. In the DHS fight, Republican leadership saw reliable allies siding with a different Ohioan than Boehner: Rep. Jim Jordan, who runs the Freedom Caucus.

Members also are threatening to stop giving money to the Republican party. After a nonprofit group aligned with Boehner aired attack ads against several of its members, some Freedom Caucus lawmakers say they will stop giving money to the National Republican Congressional Committee — a standard practice that House Republicans are expected to abide by.

“Why would we want to throw money out there when we’re going to have entities attacking our own,” Salmon said, referring to the ads run by the American Action Network. Boehner’s office has said the speaker did not support AAN airing the ads.

Still, the Freedom Caucus’ newfound power is bound to run into limits. Senate Republicans are far more moderate, and GOP leaders say they’ll be much more willing to ignore what they consider to be the group’s self-defeating strategy in future debates.

Republican leaders assert the group’s members were not honest brokers during the DHS debate. For example, several GOP leadership sources say Freedom Caucus members offered to craft a bill that would have tied DHS funding to a Texas court ruling that suspended President Barack Obama’s executive actions. The group first supported that idea, then reversed its view, the sources said. The group’s other legislative suggestions were seen as impractical, certain to be rejected by the Senate or the president. Members of the Freedom Caucus disputed this account.

With the DHS fight over, and debates over the budget and debt ceiling on deck in the coming months, the caucus is trying to find a more permanent footing that doesn’t revolve solely around the latest crisis. It’s looking to prove it has serious policy chops and the ability to pull fellow Republicans rightward, according to interviews with some of its top leaders and aides. The members, for example, are highly focused on the upcoming budget debate.

Lawmakers say they want to team up with moderate Republicans and Democrats to advance legislation. They also are considering welcoming more members to their ranks and trying to figure out ways to infuse conservative values into upcoming legislation.

It may prove tough to square the group’s work-with-leadership message with one of the group’s original aims: to cause chaos on the floor if Boehner doesn’t heed their advice. Originally, the caucus — which emerged after nearly a year of meetings between a close group of conservatives who felt the RSC had grown too large — wanted to find enough members to prevent the House from considering legislation it opposed if leadership didn’t agree to changes.

Freedom Caucus leaders also say they are trying to share their views more broadly with the House Republican Conference. They offered leadership four plans, each promptly rejected, to solve the DHS impasse, but felt that many Republicans had no idea what they were suggesting.

“If there was something we learned this week, it’s that we need to let the entire conference know what our offers are,” one caucus member, Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho.), said. “When we spoke to individuals about what we had offered, every single one, whether they were conservative, moderate, whatever you want to call them — they were shocked leadership turned down that offer.”

Their desire — and ability — to change the House Republican Conference only goes so far. Jordan and other conservatives say they won’t try to remove Boehner as speaker. Members of the group said launching a coup attempt on Boehner now, when he was just reelected to the speakership two months ago, would undermine the argument that they’re trying to broadcast: that they want to work with the larger Republican conference.

Besides, members said, there are effective ways to exert influence under a weakened leader, and it’s far from clear they’d have more sway with someone else in power.

“No one is talking about that,” Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) said. “We don’t get into personalities. We just try to lead our leadership on a more conservative direction. We try not to make it a personal issue.”

As Salmon put it, “Sometimes chaos is your friend, sometimes chaos is your enemy. It’s a flip of the coin.”

Salmon said the invite-only group could grow. Members of the group vote on any new inductee. While there are no formal guidelines, the current members are hard-line conservatives who have expressed concern about the lack of “normal order” in the House and the tendency for Boehner to rely on Democrats to approve must-pass legislation.

Beyond Jordan, the group is led by Reps. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, Justin Amash of Michigan, Labrador of Idaho, Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mark Meadows of North Carolina, Salmon, Fleming and Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina.

Leadership allies are hitting back at the group. The nonprofit American Action Network is running $400,000 worth of ads in Kansas, Oklahoma and Ohio, attacking Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) and Jordan.

Labrador said the ads made Freedom Caucus members “more popular” in their districts and provoked animosity toward Republican leaders, “even though they claimed they had nothing to do with it.”

“It does make you scratch your head when you go to a [Republican Conference] and there’s a sheet of paper there about how we’re all supposed to be team players. And while you’re sitting there getting the message from your colleagues about being a team player, you get a text from your office saying the American Action Network … is running ads against you in the district,” Mulvaney said.

Still, the group is also trying to prove it has a plan to legislate. Members are eying Democratic bills to co-sponsor and are meeting with Georgia Rep. Tom Price, the chairman of the influential Budget Committee, to talk about the GOP budget.

Freedom Caucus member David Brat, the tea party congressman who ousted former Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a surprise primary election last June, said the conservative members spent the week before the DHS funding showdown trying to make deals with the GOP leadership.

“That’s what we’re honest-to-God trying to do,” Brat (R-Va.) said. “We were trying to get to ‘yes.’”

John Bresnahan contributed to this story.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Fleming’s party affiliation.