The most recent example of the maxim that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is the tragedy that’s befallen the House Freedom Caucus.

Once, the small band of congressional rebels shed light on the growing federal debt and deficit and the sham federal budgeting process. They stood for “open, accountable, and limited” government, “the Constitution and the rule of law,” and liberty-minded policies, as their website states. Their purpose was to “give a voice to countless Americans who feel that Washington does not represent them.” Their staunch opposition to spending bills was so strident that they were mocked as the “caucus of no,” though ultimately they were able to upend John Boehner’s House speakership.

How the mighty have fallen.

Though HFC members were the original, outsider, populist candidates, the House Freedom Caucus has transmogrified so thoroughly that it bears no resemblance to what it used to be. Once Jeremiahs crying in the desert about fiscal responsibility and presidential overreach, they have become the executive branch’s biggest cheerleaders.

Last week, Congress appropriated $1.38 billion for border security, only a fraction of the border wall spending that President Trump had requested. Trump responded by declaring a national emergency, which he hoped would provide him with a legal fig leaf to dip into a variety of funds and secure the roughly $8 billion in wall money that Congress had denied him.

The House Freedom Caucus came into being precisely because its members felt that Congress’s power of the purse was being diminished due to executive orders and an opaque continuing resolution process. If anyone should have been foursquare against Trump’s national emergency—regardless of what they thought of the border wall itself—it was them.

Yet instead, members of its leadership have trumpeted the president’s talking points.

House Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows and founding member Jim Jordan made the talk show rounds to declare their support for Trump’s executive order on Sunday. When Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week” challenged Jordan and pointed out that limits on executive power were the very raison d’etre for the Freedom Caucus, Jordan dissembled:

This is a serious situation, this is a crisis. Look at the drug problem, the human trafficking problem, the gang violence problem; that’s why we need the border security wall and that’s what the president is committed to making sure happens…we tried to do it the appropriations process way and get building it, we tried to do this last year and our party—our party leaders wouldn’t even go there, Democrats certainly wouldn’t go there. So yes, it’s going to be a slow process, it’s going to go to the courts. We understand that. But better to start that process so that we can ultimately get there than to not start it at all. The new communications chair of the HFC, Congressman Jody Hice, wrote, “As I have long said, ensuring the safety and security of the American people is a fight worth fighting. While I prefer legislative solutions to executive actions to address the pressing issues of our time, the president has now been forced into declaring a national emergency.” Hice doesn’t explain how being denied requested funds by Congress and then declaring a state of emergency qualifies as a “forced” decision. Unstated, too, is concern for the dangerous precedent being set here. What is to stop a progressive president from doing exactly the same thing? Why shouldn’t a possible Democratic successor to Trump deem health care, education, and the state of the environment issues worthy of “emergency” funds, too?

Meadows acknowledged that getting House Democrats to support a legislative solution would be preferable. But then he told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan that “until we do that, why should we allow a Democrat president in the White House to use executive orders and not do the same with a Republican president?”