Members of the House Freedom Caucus are at it again. As the Huffington Post's Matt Fuller reports, this time they're more or less threatening a coup against Speaker Paul Ryan unless he sticks to their script on immigration: They want a vote on the restrictionist bill offered by Bob Goodlatte, and they certainly don't want votes on any compromise measure that might emerge from the Senate.
They're already upset with Ryan because of the recently passed agreement on spending for the remainder of the fiscal year, along with raising the debt limit and various other measures. The truth, however, is that the conservative radicals are the ones responsible for that bill. Democrats only have leverage to negotiate a fairly good deal because Ryan's Republican conference was split, with Ryan knowing he would never have the radicals' votes on anything that could even get a simple majority in the Senate. That meant Ryan would eventually need Democratic votes, which meant everyone knew from the start that some Democratic priorities would wind up being fulfilled despite the large Republican majority in the House.
What the Freedom Caucus gets out of it is the chance to win in the Real Conservative game ... at the cost of actual conservative policy preferences.
That dynamic may not be at work on immigration. Unless the bulk of the Republican conference considers protecting the Dreamers a must-pass, then the option is there to simply not do anything. If, however, either Republican congressional leaders or the president wind up blinking and extending DACA (or some equivalent), then once again the Freedom Caucus will have failed to extract concessions it could have won.
As for Ryan? It's not clear whether the Freedom Caucus would actually be able to depose him mid-session (it depends both on how some House procedures would play out and how various members of the House, including the Democrats, would act). What's more clear is that pressuring former speaker John Boehner into leaving hasn't actually yielded better policy results for the radicals, and it's very unlikely that ridding themselves of Ryan would, either.
That's not to say the radicals have never extracted policy wins. They get at least some of the credit (or blame) for the failure of comprehensive immigration reform during Barack Obama's presidency -- a compromise bill passed the Senate but was never brought up for a vote in the House. And there's certainly nothing unusual about a majority party using chamber procedure to block votes on popular measures it doesn't want to pass; both parties do that in the House when they have majorities. But the refusal to compromise that marks the Freedom Caucus radicals remains both unusual and very destructive.
