'Playing silly games': Behind the Freedom Caucus vs. Freedom Caucus throwdown in Idaho

From the beginning, conflict has been embedded in the Freedom Caucus brand.

During the past decade, the House Freedom Caucus, made up of the most right-wing members of the U.S. House of Representatives, has repeatedly gone to war with members of its own party — showing a willingness to oust a Republican speaker of the House or shut down the government if they didn’t get their way.

In late 2021, the national State Freedom Caucus Network nonprofit launched with a mission to stoke the same aggressive approach in state legislatures across the country.

In 12 states, the network helped establish and support Freedom Caucuses — coalitions of legislators built to challenge state leadership and “fake Republicans,” and to push each state government, no matter how conservative, further to the right. Touting its role in state-level battles on everything from “election integrity to critical race theory,” the network has trained legislators, offered them guidance, recommended votes on bills and pushed them to promote the national Freedom Caucus name, which has become increasingly influential in red state legislatures.

“We can save the nation one state at a time, and the SFC Network has the formula,” the network’s Idaho director, Maria Nate, wrote on social media last month.

Yet in Idaho, that formula has blown up in the national network’s face, potentially weakening Idaho’s right wing at a moment when it could exact the most influence on the Legislature.

In May, InvestigateWest exposed a secret recording of a lengthy fight between two key leaders of the Idaho Freedom Caucus: Nate, the hired representative of the national network to Idaho, and Rep. Heather Scott, the co-chair of the Idaho Freedom Caucus. That fracas revealed significant cracks emerging on Idaho’s right flank over whether to support a comparatively moderate House speaker.

Today, those cracks have become a yawning fissure. Multiple legislators have resigned from the caucus. The national network has not only cut off any support for the caucus it helped create, the group’s national director told the Idaho Dispatch, a conservative website, but it’s also preparing to launch a new version of the Freedom Caucus to challenge the current one.

Even the organization’s logo has become part of the tug-of-war.

Matthew Green, a Catholic University political scientist who has been tracking Freedom Caucus groups across the country, said he’s never seen anything quite like it.

“What’s interesting about Idaho is that you have this national organization that’s involved in this feud with the state Freedom Caucus,” Green said. “I don’t know of this happening in any other state.”

The fight has grown into a struggle over philosophy and personality at the moment when power is up for grabs. Conservatives ousted a slew of moderates in the May primary, giving the most right-wing voting bloc of legislators a genuine chance at control. But will that control go to current legislators with the Idaho Freedom Caucus? To the alternate caucus backed by the national network? Or will infighting between them cost conservative hardliners a major opportunity?

“There are efforts to get the new recruits into one camp or the other,” said conservative activist Greg Pruett, who wrote about the fight on the Idaho Dispatch. “Some have chosen to pick a side, if you will. Some are just like, we’re going to stay out of this until y’all figure it out.”

Fallout of working with Idaho House Speaker Mike Moyle

In May, there were 12 Idaho Freedom Caucus members listed on the website. Today there are nine — seven if you don’t count lame-duck members who lost the primary and won’t be in the Legislature next session.

“I reached a point where I simply could no longer compromise my principles,” Idaho Sen. Glenneda Zuiderveld, R-Twin Falls, wrote in her July newsletter, announcing her resignation from the Freedom Caucus.

The question of “compromise” had turned into a fracture point within the Idaho Freedom Caucus.

This spring, Scott, the Blanchard Republican who co-chairs the caucus, and a majority of the Idaho Freedom Caucus had publicly thrown their support behind House Speaker Mike Moyle. They saw Moyle as an ally they could bargain with, an imperfect leader but one who had already delivered conservative wins on the budget process.

But Nate, with the national network, had been horrified by Scott’s approach. She saw Moyle as a cynical political operator, someone who’d failed to use the full extent of his power to push through the conservative agenda on issues like school choice. (Nate and Scott did not respond to interview requests.)

The Freedom Caucus legislators split into two camps. Most supported Scott and Moyle. But Zuiderveld argued that the speaker “would never make the cut to be an Idaho Freedom Caucus member” and that Scott’s lack of “good judgment” in supporting him risked damaging the national freedom caucus brand.

InvestigateWest’s article in May detailing the explosive two-hour secret recording between Nate and Scott simply deepened the divide. Nate accused Scott of sexism, insulted Freedom Caucus members, and expressed doubts and confusion about her role as Idaho director of the national network.

While members asked Nate to resign amid fallout from the recording, Zuiderveld remained a staunch supporter of the SFC Network director, writing that “if she is not part of the team, I will not be part of the team.”

Ultimately, while Nate remained the Idaho director for the national network, the network cut ties with the current Idaho Freedom Caucus.

Zuiderveld resigned from the state caucus. So did Sen. Cindy Carlson.

In a phone interview and email, Carlson outlined a number of frustrations with the Idaho Freedom Caucus, from an overemphasis on fundraising and a lack of financial transparency to social media messaging being posted without being vetted by most members. She said she tried in vain to push for reforms from the current legislative leaders of the caucus, but her requests went ignored.

“We needed a change in leadership, and it wasn’t going to happen,” Carlson said.

Two freedom caucuses in Idaho

In mid-July, the current Idaho Freedom Caucus did get a change in leadership: They created a new position, an Idaho Freedom Caucus “director” who would work for the legislators instead of the D.C.-based organization. They appointed state Sen. Scott Herndon — who’d been defeated in the Republican primary — to the job.

Pruett, the writer at the Idaho Dispatch, said Herndon’s position, which included communicating with the national network, seemed to clearly supplant Nate’s position.

“His job description is Maria’s job description,” Pruett said. “It’s like, wait a minute, so you’re both doing the exact same thing?”

Herndon said he didn’t see a conflict between the organizations.

“D.C. has their own objectives, and the Idaho Freedom Caucus has its objectives,” Herndon said. “Where we have similar objectives, we can work together.”

But D.C., Pruett said, doesn’t appear to want to work with Herndon or the other leaders of the state’s current Freedom Caucus.

The national caucus network’s president told the Idaho Dispatch that the two legislative co-chairs of the Idaho Freedom Caucus, Rep. Scott and Sen. Tammy Nichols, “did not meet our standards to associate with the national brand” and that the network would refuse to associate with them going forward.

According to the secret recording obtained by InvestigateWest, Nate had declared that “nobody respects” Nichols and that one of the executives at the national network said it was “very clear… she’s not going to be leader” next year.

Herndon, on the other hand, said both “co-chairs have the full support of the caucus currently.”

“D.C. is not able to tell Idaho how to form their caucus, who should be chair, that sort of thing,” Herndon said.

Yet behind the scenes, the national network has been working to form a competing Freedom Caucus with a new set of legislators. In her newsletter, Zuiderveld wrote that she was eager to join them.

“I will be going through the interview process again in hopes of making the team,” Zuiderveld wrote.

Carlson said that as many prospective members quietly have signed up to join the new caucus as the old one. And both, she said, are calling themselves the Idaho Freedom Caucus.

Herndon’s Idaho Freedom Caucus was still fundraising, Carlson said, while the public was largely unaware about the maneuvers that had happened behind the scenes.

“People are giving them money not really knowing who they really are,” Carlson said.

Herndon says his group will continue to defend its turf.

“We own that name,” Herndon said. “We own that brand. We own everything associated with it.”

But their decision to keep the logo may be heading to litigation.

Technically, the first version of the Idaho Freedom Caucus was created in March 2017, before the SFC Network even existed. But that version quickly fizzled out — and the logo, featuring blue, red and lavender flames unfurling from the “I” in Idaho, has been abandoned.

The national network helped legislators resurrect the Idaho Freedom Caucus in 2022 giving them a brand-new logo based on the one used by the House Freedom Caucus in Congress. But in June, Scott filed a trademark for that Idaho Freedom Caucus logo, the one with a torch design identical to the one the network had been using in Idaho for over a year, and in every Freedom Caucus it supports across the country.

In a statement to the Idaho Dispatch, the SFC Network president said the logo is not approved for use in Idaho and their “attorneys will handle this going forward.”

Incoming Idaho GOP legislators urged to pick a side in Freedom Caucus debate

The Freedom Caucus battle has spilled out into internet comments on websites like Idaho Dispatch and even Wikipedia. Multiple accounts have been banned from editing the Idaho Freedom Caucus Wikipedia page after Wikipedia editors determined the pseudonymous accounts who supposedly were removing “misinformation” and “revisionist history” had too close of a connection to the subject.

Incoming legislators are being urged to pick a side.

Kyle Harris, a conservative legislative candidate in Lewiston, said he’s spoken with both camps but is still “feeling them out” before deciding which team to join.

“I could see myself aligned with either one,” Harris said. “They’re basically both fighting for the same thing. It’s just who’s in charge or who’s calling the shots.”

Ideologically, there’s little difference between the two groups. Herndon said they crunched the numbers, comparing the scores that the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major organization aligned with the GOP, gave to the current Idaho Freedom Caucus state legislators with legislators in every other Freedom Caucus.

“We are the most conservative caucus in the nation,” Herndon said.

But where the caucus network may be horrified at the idea of teaming up with a speaker of the House like Moyle, Herndon said the current state Freedom Caucus uses a “certain amount of pragmatism” to get policies passed if it doesn’t mean compromising principles.

The national network is a lot more focused on finding candidates to run for national office and making noise, while his group cares more about results, Herndon said.

“Their interest is in being louder,” Herndon said. “They’re not used to being in a position where they actually have significant influence. We actually have significant influence. … We’re not here just to make noise and do mean tweets.”

Some conservatives plan to sit the whole fight out.

“I’m done with both sides,” said Carlson, the former Freedom Caucus member. “I didn’t run for office to waste my time playing silly games. I’m very serious in what I’m doing.”

She adds that success for conservatives this year “depends on if the legislators want to work together in spite of their differences.”

But for now, the only clear winner of the political battle between the current Idaho Freedom Caucus and the national network may be Moyle, who Nate, with the national network, had accused of being a “moderate.”

Moyle managed to get a majority of the Idaho Freedom Caucus on his side, while leaders who took a more aggressive approach, like Idaho Senate President Pro Tem Chuck Winder, were ousted in the primary.

At minimum, he divided Idaho’s most hardcore conservative wing. Beyond that, he gained a slew of right-wing allies at a time when the right had won big gains in the state.

Moyle notably had clashed with Nate’s husband, Ron, when he served in the Idaho House, and had even donated $1,000 to his opponent.

Moyle believes the animosity toward him is partly personal, saying that he’d once helped Ron Nate out but Ron had “crapped” on him.

Pressed to clarify how exactly, he sent a text punctuated with a cowboy smiley face emoji.

“Doesn’t matter,” he wrote. “Time to move on and get things done.”

Idaho Capital Sun is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com. Follow Idaho Capital Sun on Facebook and X.