Positive Reactions From Conservative Blogosphere For Fleming’s Freedom Caucus; Not So Much From Local Dem Organs

File this under “predictable.” The Conservative Review put out a statement congratulating Rep. John Fleming for helping to found the new House Freedom Caucus, and in the process taking a swipe at recent management of the Republican Study Committee, the body the HFC is meant to replace…

Conservative Review lauded Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) for joining eight other conservatives to form the House Freedom Caucus today.

For months, Conservative Review has called for an alternative to the Republican Study Committee (RSC)Once the bastion of conservative leadership in the House of Representatives, the RSC has become a Trojan Horse for members to cloak their liberal votes in conservative trappings. The House Freedom Caucus marks a new beginning for conservative leadership in the House.

“Today, Rep. Fleming, with other committed and energetic conservatives, took a bold step in moving the Republican Party in a better direction. Over the past few years, as the RSC has become an ineffective check on House leadership, conservative influence has waned. Starting a truly conservative group will empower a critical mass of members to bind together and force House leaders in a direction more in line with the party platform and the needs of the American people instead of the interests of K Street. 

“Louisianans should be proud of Fleming for starting a group that actually believe Republicans were elected to provide a bold contrast on key issues.  Working together, coupled with their counterparts in the Senate and in the conservative movement, the Freedom Caucus will have a lot of leverage to help establish a model of conservative governance headed into 2016,” said Senior Editor Daniel Horowitz.

Breitbart’s writeup of the new organization contains a similar characterization, with a citation to an old National Journal article about the group’s pre-founding…

A new caucus aimed at pushing “an agenda of limited, constitutional government” is up-and-running, launched by nine conservative members of the House of Representatives.

Monday the conservative Republicans — including many who’ve been critics of House leadership — announced the formation of what they call the House Freedom Caucus.

According to National Journal, the founding members have been dissatisfied that the RSC, which was set up to wield conservative force in the conference, has been getting too close to leadership.

The National Review story on the group focuses a bit more on what its practical effects might be

“We’re going to focus on what we believe middle-class voters sent us here to do,” Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the de facto chairman of the organization pending leadership elections, tells National Review Online.

As a caucus devoted to moving leadership’s agenda to the right, the group has a chance to take over the traditional role of the Republican Study Committee, which many lawmakers believe has strayed from its founding mission as an organization designed to pressure moderate GOP leaders to adopt more conservative positions. National Journal first reported that such a group was forming.

The POLITICO story on the group, and the story on it at The Hill, were both fairly nondescript – the Hill’s piece even included a bit of inside baseball to the tune of HFC founder Rep. Mick Mulvaney’s unsuccessful bid to take over the RSC and loss due to House Majority Whip Steve Scalise’s efforts on behalf of Rep. Bill Flores, who won that race, and here Mulvaney is starting up a competing group.

And then we have the Baton Rouge Advocate’s blog post on the HFC. The post was put up by Greg Roberts, whose addition to the Advocate staff we noted back in May of last year by checking out his curriculum vitae

And what do you get when this is the guy you hire as your political reporter?

Well, how about this headline?

U.S. REP. JOHN FLEMING, R-LA., AND OTHER RIGHT-WINGERS PICK NAME FOR THEIR NEW ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE ASSEMBLAGE: HOUSE FREEDOM CAUCUS

Sounds like balanced journalism, right?

Unlike for-print articles at papers like the Advocate, where the headlines are usually generated by the editors rather than the reporters, it’s a reasonably safe assumption the blog post headlines come from the writers.

So what’s in Roberts’ piece?

Nothing much out of the ordinary, except here’s the first graph…

What U.S. Rep. John Fleming, of Minden, and other hard-right House Republicans set in motion a few weeks ago now has a name: the House Freedom Caucus, a group dedicated to advancing a strongly conservative agenda.

So in the headline and the first paragraph we count four references to hard-right and ultra-conservative. A bit repetitive, no?

As one wag we discussed this with noted, “Let’s see, how many times has he used the phrase ultra-liberal?”

It’s pretty funny when Louisiana’s largest paper, which the Advocate is now bragging that it is, is writing stories that are more openly, foaming-at-the-mouth, partisan left-wing Democrat than what comes out of POLITICO. But that’s what we have.

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