Torpedoed: How Mitch McConnell and Congress Fell to the Freedom Caucus

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s 2023 Annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore. 

When then-little-known Mike Johnson (R-LA) took office as Speaker of the House of Representatives in late 2023 on the shoulders of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, it could have marked an end to the partisan squabbling that consumed House Republicans all year long, beginning with the stalemate over the election of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to the speakership and ending with his ouster and a monthlong battle over his successor. Instead, Johnson began his speakership by engaging in open conflict with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) over an impending government shutdown, marking sharp divisions between the House and Senate blocs of the Republican Party. McConnell wanted to strike a more bipartisan appropriations deal that was more likely to gain the necessary support of the Democrats controlling the Senate. Johnson did not want to make concessions on the Republican agenda and refused to compromise. Ultimately, Johnson won the battle, as Senate conservatives pressured McConnell to agree to Johnson’s more contentious appropriations arrangement. The success of Johnson’s combative approach toward legislating (even within his own party), as well as the circumstances of his rise to the speakership, made two things clear: first, that the House Republican bloc has been captured by the Freedom Caucus; and second, that it has gained the upper hand against the McConnell-led establishment in the Senate. 

Conventional American political wisdom holds that the House is more reactionary than the Senate. It seems shocking that Mitch McConnell, who consolidated his power over the span of a decadelong tenure as Senate Republican leader, could have lost a political showdown with a House Speaker who had just emerged from a chaotic maelstrom of infighting. But it didn’t take long for House Republicans to again flex their muscles, killing a bipartisan Senate deal on border security, a deal behind which McConnell had thrown his full support. And now it’s McConnell who is stepping down from Senate leadership, a feeble ending to a formidable reign atop the Republican Party.

McConnell is a calculated power broker who famously led Senate Republicans in stonewalling former President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. However, ever since the Freedom Caucus’ ouster of McCarthy and installation of Johnson as speaker, McConnell himself has been stonewalled. However, McConnell has been chiefly thwarted not by his Democratic opposition, nor even by a vocal insurgency at the fringes of the Republican ranks, but by none other than his fellow Republican Congressional leaders. Recently, amid various bipartisan negotiations and dealmaking, it seems as though McConnell has a better working relationship with Democrats in the Senate than with his Republican counterparts in the House.

The type of intrapartisan conflict between Johnson and McConnell is unlike anything seen in Congress in the past decade. There’s been plenty of Republican infighting, of course, from the Tea Party repeatedly handicapping the speakership of John Boehner (R-OH) to the multiple attempts of the Tea Party’s ideological successor, the Freedom Caucus, to challenge establishment conservatives like former Speaker McCarthy and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA). That is nothing out of the ordinary—Democrats in Congress have similarly dealt with conflict within their own ranks, most notably from then Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), who torpedoed many initiatives by President Joe Biden and the Democratic leadership, just as the Tea Party constrained the Republican House a decade earlier. However, the conflict between Johnson and McConnell is not just another example of establishment leaders fending off a rebellion from the outskirts of their coalition. Here are the two pillars of the Republican legislative bloc, in active opposition to each other’s policy platforms.

This clash between pragmatism and ideology marks a sharp divide between Johnson and McConnell’s divergent approaches to policymaking in general. In their initial fight over funding, McConnell was motivated by a desire to avoid a prolonged battle with Senate Democrats and an unpopular and politically lethal government shutdown. Knowing that Senate Democrats would never pass Johnson’s favored plan, McConnell believed that it would behoove Congressional Republicans ahead of the 2024 election to avoid a shutdown. Johnson took a far less pragmatic approach, however, throwing legislative caution to the wind with the same “do first, think later” approach that led to the October 2023 leadership crisis in which the House Republicans’ far-right Freedom Caucus flank was quick to oust Kevin McCarthy but slow to provide a realistic solution to the problem they railed against. 

Regarding abortion policy, meanwhile, McConnell knows that pro-life legislation would never get through the Democratic Senate and Biden’s White House, and thus that advancing abortion legislation would only produce a costly stalemate and legislative failure for Republicans. Johnson, meanwhile, wants to take action on abortion despite lacking a clear plan on how to get it through the upper chamber. McConnell maintains that he has experienced the pitfalls of divided government that have brought Congress grinding to a halt several times throughout his career, while Johnson blames McConnell and the “old guard” of establishment Republicans for failing to properly achieve Republican goals over the last decade-plus.

This feud is not merely a disagreement over policy between fellow leaders, or an insurgency within a party’s ranks that can be put down by an effective leader. The top House Republican and the top Senate Republican have fundamentally different views on how to govern. The type of rhetoric that McConnell and Johnson have engaged in sounds much more like that of Democrats and Republicans warring incessantly over an ideological issue, and certainly not like members of the same party who are tasked with cooperating to navigate a polarized partisan landscape. Dr. Ross Baker, professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, observes that “paradoxically, McConnell finds it easier to talk to [Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat] than his Republican counterpart in the House.” This type of stalemate and state of open conflict is expected between Democrats and Republicans, but not between the top brass of the same party. And the X-factor appears to be the Freedom Caucus.

To trace the roots of the Freedom Caucus, we can look as far back as the 1970s, when conservative Republicans in Congress formed the Republican Study Committee to coordinate and mobilize legislators to advance conservative values in the legislature and push party leaders to the right, providing the template and infrastructure for future Republican subversives to organize their congressional actions.

The Republican Study Committee is no longer a strong force for conservatism in Congress. When the Tea Party swept into Congress during the early days of the Obama administration, propelling nativism and fiscal conservatism to the forefront of the Republican Party, these values became so en vogue that even moderate Republicans rushed to join the Study Committee in order to bolster their conservative bona fides. Once an energetic splinter group, the Study Committee’s ideological purity became diluted as, thanks to the salience of the Tea Party, it became assimilated into the party center. The party’s true conservatives, led by Jim Jordan (R-OH), subsequently broke away from the Study Committee to form a new fringe group for twenty-first century conservatism, today’s Freedom Caucus.

The Tea Party has been credited with obstructing the legislative agendas of two Republican speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, but the Freedom Caucus has gone much further than their ideological antecedents. In 2023, they paralyzed the House not once but twice, gaining unprecedented institutional power and using it to achieve unprecedented ends, deposing their own party’s speaker despite only comprising a faction of the conference. And with Mike Johnson’s anointment as speaker, the Freedom Caucus completed their hostile takeover of the House of Representatives. Johnson had frequently attended Freedom Caucus meetings and received money from its PAC, and ideologically he is closely aligned with Freedom Caucus leader Jim Jordan. By forcing Speaker McCarthy to empower them with the motion to vacate, and by deploying this power to oust McCarthy and replace him with Johnson, the Freedom Caucus made its mark on Congress more decisively than the Tea Party ever did.

Like the larger Republican caucus it seeks to control, the Freedom Caucus is certainly susceptible to inner turmoil, and it seems to lack a true leadership apparatus. Indeed, the caucus inadvertently demonstrated its weakness when it failed to unify the Republican caucus behind a new speaker candidate for an entire month, paralyzing the House’s operations for the entire month of October. But despite the caucus’ internal turmoil, every step of the prolonged leadership struggle—the ousting of Kevin McCarthy, the blocked campaigns of other popular Republican candidates (including, fittingly, the current chair of the Study Committee), and the anointing of Mike Johnson—was a direct result of the Freedom Caucus using their newly acquired institutional power to get their way.

Now, with Mitch McConnell acceding to their legislative demands and stepping out of their way, the influence of the Freedom Caucus has captured even Republicans in the Senate. The Tea Party was mostly a phenomenon confined to the House, as both Senate Democrats and the McConnell establishment successfully defended far-right challengers in the 2010s. McConnell has survived attacks from the Freedom Caucus flank before. But now, he is vulnerable to political incapacitation due to open conflict with not only insurgents, troublemakers, and rabble-rousers, but with his fellow Republican Congressional leaders.

McConnell spent years shoring up his power to build a lethal legislative apparatus in the Senate, preparing for pivotal legislative moments for the conservative movement— like, say, negotiating a deal with Senate Democrats to tighten border security and realize years of Republican campaign promises. But McConnell found himself undermined and thwarted when Johnson refused to pass the border security bill due to the bipartisan nature of its negotiations. McConnell had successfully maneuvered to put his party in position for a keystone legislative victory, and yet he found himself torpedoed by the reactionary elements of that same party, impelled by a Republican speaker willing to sacrifice legislative achievement for ideological clout.

With McConnell stepping down from Republican leadership at the end of his term, conditions are ripe for the Freedom Caucus to gain even more influence in a chamber that has largely resisted its impulses up until now. Mike Johnson is increasingly grappling with House Republicans, as he, like McConnell, has resorted to working with Democrats to fund the government and tighten the border. Members of the Freedom Caucus have expressed discontent with Johnson’s tenure, and just as Matt Gaetz (R-FL) led the charge to depose McCarthy, fellow radical Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has threatened to remove Johnson for choosing pragmatism over ideology. It seems as though the House of Representatives in 2024 is clearly at the mercy of the Freedom Caucus.

With Democrats on track to lose their Senate majority in the 2024 elections, and the Freedom Caucus poised to expand its influence in the chamber following McConnell’s recusal from leadership, the stage is set for the Freedom Caucus to solidify its power in the Senate and shape the political landscape of Congress in the months ahead.

Simon Panfilio (CC ’25) is a staff writer majoring in political science and minoring in history. He is from Denver, Colorado and is interested in American elections, the American presidency, and the politics of bureaucracy and infrastructure.