Why these Republicans finally stood up to Donald Trump

The One Big Beautiful Bill isn’t quite dead. But it is resting. Five hardline conservative Republicans joined the Democrats on the House Budget Committee to sink President Donald Trump’s massive domestic policy and tax cut legislation.

The main culprits were the House Freedom Caucus, the group of rambunctious hellraisers who have long been a thorn in the side of Republican leadership since its formation in 2015. Specifically, Representatives Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Chip Roy of Texas led the charge.

Roy and Norman, the two most senior Freedom Caucus members on the committee, complained that the bill did not go far enough because it did little to reduce the deficit and it only enacts Medicaid work requirements in 2029, when Trump would leave office.

On Thursday, Roy told The Independent that delaying them for four years was “absurd.” Roy, Norman and Clyde in particular have a history of defying Republican leadership. Roy’s record goes back all the way to his time as Sen. Ted Cruz’s chief of staff when Cruz orchestrated a government shutdown — which is when Cruz also famously filibustered by reading Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor- in an attempt to defund the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s signature law. They also have a history of folding just as quickly when it counts. Initially, all three joined the attempt to block Kevin McCarthy from being speaker in 2023.

But a series of backroom deals and sweet committee assignments led to them flipping to support McCarthy. They also did not take part in Matt Gaetz’s coup against McCarthy, but both did block Steve Scalise’s ascent to be speaker, which gave way to a much more conservative speaker in Johnson.

Earlier this year, when it came time to vote for speaker, when Roy’s name was called, he remained silent in the middle of the House chamber aisle and tapped his foot while Norman voted for Jim Jordan. But they ultimately voted for Johnson. Then, in April, when it came time for the House to vote for the Senate’s version of the budget resolution to begin writing the legislative text, Roy and Norman spent most of their week stamping their feet about how it did not go far enough on spending cuts before they came around and voted for the budget resolution. Roy and Norman also share another trait: neither of them endorsed Trump in the 2024 primary. Roy endorsed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, and even campaigned for him in Iowa. Norman, despite his conservatism, endorsed his fellow South Carolinian and former governor Nikki Haley.

That last trait has set off Trump in the past. When Roy joined the Democrats to kill a stripped-down continuing resolution in December, Trump called for a primary challenge. Roy, Norman, Clyde and everyone else in the Freedom Caucus objecting to the legislation shows that they face a central tension: They see themselves as the guardkeepers of conservatism and the purists while everyone else is a RINO or a fake conservative; but in this current era of the Republican party, conservatism means whatever Trump wants it to mean.

That presents a central problem for actual fiscal conservatives who care about reining in federal spending. Trump has never believed much in their ideology. In fact, he busted the budget with his 2017 tax cuts, which the One Big Beautiful Bill seeks to reauthorize, and put them on the credit card. Trump also grew the size of government during the Covid-19 pandemic by sending out stimulus checks and engaging in Operation Warp Speed to develop the Covid-19 vaccine (when The Independent asked Roy, a cancer survivor, many years ago if he had been vaccinated, he said “none of your business”). He also has pledged not to touch Social Security or Medicare and has said only “waste, fraud and abuse” would be targeted in Medicaid while conservatives like the Freedom Caucus want long-term fixes since they see these programmes as debt bombs if they remain on their current trajectory.

But opposing Trump, even in the name of fiscal restraint, becomes a tall order. The Freedom Caucus will need to make a choice going into the next phase of legislating: Will they decide to be a faction dedicated to controlling spending and lowering taxes like right-wingers of yore, or will they simply be a Trump fan club? Many of the original Freedom Caucus founders decided to pick the latter and were rewarded handsomely. Jim Jordan went from being called a “legislative terrorist” to being House Judiciary Committee Chairman. Mark Meadows became Trump’s chief of staff. Meanwhile, the caucus’s actual fiscal conservatives like Ken Buck and Justin Amash left Congress bitterly disappointed and Trump made it a priority to humiliate DeSantis in 2024.

But being the ones who personally sink the legislation of the president of their own party is never a fun position. Just ask Joe Manchin how he feels after killing Build Back Better under Joe Biden.