A new PBS documentary has exposed the motivating factors behind House Freedom Caucus members’ decision to propel donor-class favorite Paul Ryan into the most powerful position in Congress. As Speaker of the House, Ryan will have unilateral control over many aspects of the congressional agenda, including passage of Obamatrade in the lame duck session and amnesty legislation in 2017.
The two-hour long presentation reveals that the House Freedom Caucus’ founding members have been among the most ardent boosters in Congress of Ryan’s career and his closest allies in trying to implement Marco Rubio’s 2013 amnesty plan. It is this fact that explains how the group labeled by the media as anti-establishment foes is now the group responsible for placing the establishment’s favorite politician at the doorstep of the Speaker’s office.
In recent days, prominent conservatives and grassroots activists have slammed the House Freedom Caucus for what they described as a “betrayal” of the Republican electorate. As Rush Limbaugh said after Ryan issued his list of demands to House lawmakers:
You would not think that the Freedom Caucus, the conservatives in the House, the Tea Party caucus, whatever you want to call them, no way would they go along with this. No way under the sun would they go along with this. … But it looks like enough of them will. … This is how we get. … I don’t want to say “played,” folks, but I’m telling you: the script is written offsite, backstage. We don’t see that. We see everybody playing their part, including the Freedom Caucus members.
However, what conservative activists describe as a “betrayal” is, for several key members of the House Freedom Caucus, the fulfillment of their long-time desire to implement amnesty and alter the demographics of their districts through expanded immigration. While the GOP electorate ejected Eric Cantor in large measure due to his support for Marco Rubio’s amnesty drive—followed by John Boehner and current Whip Kevin McCarthy—the PBS documentary reveals that one of the founding members of the House Freedom Caucus, Mick Mulvaney, embraces an even more progressive immigration agenda than Cantor himself.
The documentary, which aired on October 20, casts Mulvaney at the center of the La Raza-backed 2013 and 2014 immigration push, alongside Paul Ryan and Luis Gutierrez. As PBS writes on its website, the documentary is “a fly-on-the-wall look at the high-stakes effort to broker a deal [on immigration] in Congress–an effort led by Rep. Luis Gutierrez.” The site continues, “In addition to Gutierrez … we meet Mick Mulvaney (R-SC)–a Tea Party member who communicates with his Spanish-speaking constituents in their own language, and who chastises members of his party” for opposing mass amnesty.
This helps explain why, after Ryan announced his candidacy for Speaker, Mulvaney and Gutierrez were among those who most aggressively boosted Ryan in the media.
In an October 11 CBS interview, Mulvaney foreshadowed how the House Freedom Caucus would end up putting Gutierrez’s pick for Speaker into office. Mulvaney praised Ryan as a “conservative guy” and encouraged Ryan’s run by suggesting that the Republican Party may “need” Ryan as Speaker.
“If we went down the list right now and said, ‘Okay, who could unite the party in the House?’ certainly Paul [Ryan] comes right to the head of the list,” Mulvaney said. When asked at the time about Ryan’s hesitancy to assume the position, Mulvaney declared, “Sometimes, you just need to do it. Right? The country needs you [Paul Ryan]. The party needs you [Paul Ryan]. And if he decides he wants to do it, that’s great.”
The pivotal event that broke the back of conservative opposition to Ryan was when, even though Ryan failed to get the 80% threshold necessary to earn the House Freedom Caucus’ formal endorsement, Ryan’s allies in the group leaked publicly their private deliberations and declared that a “supermajority” of members would be backing Ryan–thus violating their own rules and their pledge to Daniel Webster.
“He satisfied many of us,” Mick Mulvaney triumphantly told CNN after the group met with Ryan behind closed doors.
Mulvaney told CNN that he believes his colleagues should throw their support behind Ryan’s Speakership and declared, “The bottom line is if he wants to be Speaker, he has the votes as of tonight.” With those words, Mulvaney all but ensured that the Speakership would go to the man whom NumbersUSA President Roy Beck described as “terrifying” and “the heart and soul of crony capitalism”:
He has spent his entire adulthood ideologically connected to the open borders crowd. Open Borders is in his ideological DNA. That’s the terrifying thing. He’s an ideologue and his spent his whole life working for ideologues. Open borders seeps out of every pore of his being.
Another pro-amnesty House Freedom Caucus Member, Raul Labrador, echoed Mulvaney’s declaration that the Speakership was now a lock for Ryan: “We can support him and we want him to be successful,” Labrador said. Labrador was a member of the House’s Gang of Eight effort to pass amnesty until public pressure forced him to drop out of the group. As Breitbart News has previously reported, immigration experts have described Labrador as equally enthusiastic about expanding immigration as is Kevin McCarthy or Eric Cantor.
In a piece entitled “Why the Freedom Caucus Betrayed Talk Radio–And Backed Paul Ryan,” Matt Lewis writes, “The Freedom Caucus has a lot of members who are (or have been) open to some type of [immigration] reform (which makes sense, considering the libertarian framing of the name ‘Freedom Caucus.'”
By “immigration reform,” Lewis is adopting a widely used progressive euphemism for amnesty and legislation, making it even easier to hire foreign workers in place of Americans.
Lewis calls out Mick Mulvaney, Raul Labrador, Justin Amash, Jim Jordan, and Mark Meadows specifically by name as members of the House Freedom Caucus who support expanding record high immigration–against the wishes of more than nine in ten Republican voters who want all immigration frozen or slashed, according to Pew.
The PBS documentary confirms Lewis’ theory.
In 2014, Paul Ryan was tasked with crafting a bill and whipping House Republicans to support Marco Rubio’s immigration-expansion agenda. The stealth effort was nearly successful. Indeed, according to the PBS documentary, pro-amnesty Washington Republicans were in the process of enjoying celebratory drinks to commemorate their soon-to-be amnesty victory when the news suddenly broke that Eric Cantor had lost his primary election to populist opponent Dave Brat, who had hammered Cantor for his support of expanding immigration against the wishes of his constituents. According to the documentary, had it not been for Brat’s election, the Ryan-Rubio amnesty plan would have passed–permanently altering the balance of political power in the country away from GOP voters and towards immigrant voters.
“Only a couple of dozen people knew how close it had come,” the documentary’s narrator said.
Much of Ryan’s effort had been conducted in secret with Luis Gutierrez. As Gutierrez told the filmmakers wryly, “Paul Ryan and I talk.”
“What we do with Ryan,” Gutierrez explained, “is he puts together a bunch of bills, one of which is legalization, and that’s the one we join him on. The legalization is good enough that I can go and say we need to get in bed.”
While Ryan was “getting in bed” with Gutierrez to push amnesty, the whole affair had to be conducted in secret so as not to tip off Republican voters to their plan.
“You feel like you have to kind of sneak around to have dinner with these guys,” Gutierrez’s communications director, Douglas Rivlin, said, referring to his secret meetings with House Republicans to push amnesty. “Unlike some of you [expletive deleted], I don’t mess around with my wife, so–but let me tell you–right? I feel like I’m sneaking around right on my party … when I have dinner with you guys,” he said.
Gutierrez confirmed, “Right. … We can’t tell people. That’s OK. Maybe that’s the way this has got to get done. But if those are the rules, those are the rules.”
The documentary explains that Gutierrez and Ryan’s stealth amnesty operation hinged upon the secret support of House Freedom Caucus’ founding member, Mick Mulvaney.
“Here’s the surprise,” the narrator says. “The strategy is to target the hardcore Tea Party conservatives like Mick Mulvaney, guys who’ve even voted against Boehner in the speakership elections,” a narrator explained. “If Tea Party stars support their bill, the more cautious Republicans will follow.”
The documentary reveals how Mick Mulvaney is one of the most open borders members of the House.
At a Republican Party Breakfast in Goose Creek, South Carolina, Mulvaney demeaned his conservative constituents and colleagues, such as Steve King, who oppose Ryan’s mass amnesty plan–suggesting that they are “absurd” and “stupid.”
“We need to stop celebrating the absurd in our party and stop rewarding the outrageous and the stupid,” Mulvaney declared as he made the case for disenfranchising his own voters with mass immigration.
This is not the first time Mulvaney has demeaned conservatives to further his immigration agenda. In a recent congressional hearing, Mulvaney criticized acclaimed Heritage scholar Robert Rector for providing U.S. lawmakers with factual evidence that granting amnesty to poor migrants would strain the nation’s federal welfare programs at the expense of Mulvaney’s own taxpaying constituents. Mulvaney vehemently objected to Rector’s analysis and insisted that admitting poor and uneducated migrants who are “literally starving to death” in foreign countries would be a boon to America.
Five billion people in the world live on less than $10 a day, according to the Pew Research Center.
Mulvaney has taken several actions indicating he is not pleased with the makeup of his own constituency. Even though it is technically a requirement of U.S. citizenship that one become proficient in English, Mulvaney held town halls in Spanish to tout his support for the Rubio-Ryan immigration vision. Mulvaney, however, is not fluent in the language. Throughout the town hall, Mulvaney had to consult a cheat sheet, or what he described as his “list of [Spanish] words and phrases that I will forget,” so he could speak to his non-English speaking audience.
Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly has argued against encouraging the further balkanization of the nation in this way by making allowances for immigrants not to assimilate and not to learn English. Schlafly has said, for instance, that Rubio’s habit of delivering dueling message in English and Spanish–including his Spanish-language support for executive amnesty–should disqualify him from running in the GOP’s primary.
Yet at a private dinner between Gutierrez and pro-amnesty Republican Mario Diaz Balart, the documentary captured Mulvaney’s disdain for his constituents.
Rep. LUIS GUTIÉRREZ: “Is Mulvaney helping you?”
Rep. MARIO DÍAZ-BALART: “It’s big time. He wants yes!”
Rep. LUIS GUTIÉRREZ: “He’s from South Carolina.”
Rep. LUIS GUTIÉRREZ: “This son of a [EXPLETIVE] has town hall meetings in Spanish. And then when the blanco [‘the white guy’] says, ‘Hey, Congressman, why did you have that meeting?’ [Mulvaney] says, ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘I couldn’t understand,’ [The blanco/‘the white guy’says].
‘I wasn’t talking to you.’ [Mulvaney replies]. [Gutierrez laughs] I wasn’t talking to you!”
While Mulvaney condescends to his constituents who are concerned about the balkinzation of their community, he was giddy about the prospect of working with open borders radical, Luis Gutierrez. Mulvaney described the process of working with Democrats, like Gutierrez, to pass amnesty as “invigorating.”
Mulvaney said:
The thing that was encouraging was before the meltdown on the southwestern border, it’s fair to say that there were a majority of Republicans who wanted to take it up now. I was absolutely convinced that there were Republicans and Democrats in the House that wanted to fix the problem. And that’s–that’s kind of invigorating.
The documentary confirms the thesis that while the GOP electorate rebelled against GOP leaders because they thought they were not conservative enough, these House Freedom Caucus members rebelled against GOP leaders because they were not libertarian enough–and therefore were apparently willing to overlook Ryan’s role in busting federal spending caps due to his avid support for open-door trade and immigration policies. Ryan is also in favor of reducing criminal sentences, another libertarian project.
If Matt Lewis is correct in his assertion that these members are more libertarian than conservative, that means that they would share Ryan’s support for the idea that labor, goods, and people should be able to move freely across international boundaries. This vision rejects the idea that a nation’s citizens have a moral claim to preference for jobs, benefits, and security within their own country.
Media figures have been struggling to explain why the House Freedom Caucus supported Ryan, but the PBS documentary makes clear that the founding member of the House Freedom Caucus is perhaps Ryan’s closest amnesty partner in Congress, and other House Freedom Caucus members share that same libertarian open borders ideology. Because Ryan would have known this better than anyone, he had every reason in the world to put the Speaker’s decision in the hands of the House Freedom Caucus. In effect, the revolt against open borders that felled Cantor–and which began the leadership shake-up that toppled Boehner and blocked McCarthy–was placed, at the final minutes, in the hands of a caucus founded and populated by several of Congress’ most open borders members.
As one immigration-reduction operative told Breitbart News, “On Thursday, Luis Gutierrez is likely to see his pick for House Speaker elected to lead the Republican Party. Mick Mulvaney is Gutierrez’s proxy vote. Letting Mick Mulvaney crown the next House Speaker is like putting Benedict Arnold in charge of crossing the Delaware.”