The Freedom Caucus Has Been Wreaking Havoc On Washington. Now It's Exporting the Chaos to the States.

Since its founding in 2015, the hardline House Freedom Caucus has been a polarizing presence, using confrontational and obstructionist tactics to push Congress, and the Republican Party, to the right on a variety of issues. In the process, the group ousted a Republican House speaker and became a far-right conservative power center of its own.

But it’s come at considerable cost to the House as a legislative body, and created an even more factionalized and dysfunctional chamber.

Now, those same issues are surfacing in statehouses across the nation where in recent years the Freedom Caucus has exported its model. Many of the 11 legislatures with state-based Freedom Caucuses have seen their Republican majorities splinter and descend into bitter conflict with the application of the Congress-honed tactics.

“It’s the same kind of battles that are going on with the Freedom Caucus in Washington, D.C.,” said South Carolina state Rep. Jay Kilmartin, who has been a member of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus since 2022. “We ran because we got frustrated with what we were getting out of our state Republican Party for so long.”

Few states have experienced as much intraparty turmoil as South Carolina, where state Freedom Caucus members and more mainstream GOP leaders have clashed over a wide variety of issues, leading to litigation and sparking numerous primary challenges. Freedom Caucus members have used the state budgeting process to bring up social issues like diversity initiatives within universities, spoken out against what they call government handouts to private companies and pushed for more restrictive bans on gender-affirming care.

“They are a ‘let’s govern by bumper sticker’ entity,” said South Carolina state Rep. Micah Caskey, a Republican who is an outspoken critic of the caucus. “I have a general contempt for what I see as the lack of integrity and honesty with which they approach legislating.”

Freedom Caucus-aligned legislators who spoke with Nightly said that their support came from grassroots activists, but they also receive significant help from the State Freedom Caucus Network, a D.C.-based group that is helping the upstart caucuses go toe-to-toe with the established GOP order. The network pays the salaries of state directors who help legislators read bills, do policy analysis and act as a kind of connective tissue for ideologically similar lawmakers across the nation.

That organization launched in December of 2021 in connection with the Conservative Partnership Institute, a rapidly growing conservative group tied to former Donald Trump chief of staff and Freedom Caucus co-founder Mark Meadows.

Andy Roth, the network’s president, said that the idea for the network came from state lawmakers who were interested in pursuing the “business model” of the D.C.-based House Freedom Caucus in their own states.

Roth said the eventual goal for the group is to have Freedom Caucuses in all 50 states.

“State lawmakers are often part-time, they don’t have an office, and they have very little when it comes to support to help read bills and do policy analysis,” Roth said. “We basically just provide another set of eyes and ears to help these lawmakers.”

The effect, however, has been to sow the seeds of division in places like Wyoming and Missouri, where there’s already bad blood with a Freedom Caucus outpost that was only officially formed in January. Missouri Republican leaders were so frustrated by the caucus’ tactics that they stripped members of committee assignments and even certain choice parking spots.

“The year started off with the Freedom Caucus being attacked before we even stepped foot in the building,” said Freedom Caucus member state Sen. Nick Schroer.

Schroer was the one behind an attention-grabbing draft rule change in January that would have permitted dueling between state lawmakers to settle disputes. He said that he circulated the rule to make a point about the incivility that had taken over the chamber.

Caskey, the South Carolina Republican, laments that the Freedom Caucus tactics are stunts that, in the end, don’t enable lawmakers to pass more conservative legislation.

“They are an emotional annoyance and a nuisance more than anything,” he said. “But they all stay on message, and that has allowed their insurgency to metastasize.”