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The coming weeks will put Republicans to the test on an issue with which the party, and the broader conservative movement, has long struggled: ObamaCare.
Now that the government shutdown is nearing an end, negotiations about how and whether to extend the enhanced subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year will ramp up — with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) promising a vote on extending the subsidies in December as part of a deal to end the shutdown.
The issue is poised to roil the party and the broader conservative movement just as it has for more than a decade now, including through the bruising, failed attempt to repeal ObamaCare during President Trump’s first term.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said that Republicans will negotiate on the subsidies only after the government reopens, and last week he declined to commit to hold a vote on extending the subsidies in the House. There are conflicting opinions among Republicans about how to handle the looming expiration.
Republicans insist that they have plans for how to tweak and reform health care and the tax credits and regularly argue that the Affordable Care Act actually increased health care prices. But as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has complained, there is not a clear vision about what Republicans want to do on health care more broadly.
Johnson in recent weeks has pointed to a years-old Republican Study Committee health care report when asked about GOP health care plans, and he said that House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) is working with the chairs of three House committees to compile a Republican health care plan. But there is still plenty of uncertainty about how the issue will be resolved — with Democrats hoping, and Republicans warning, that failing to get it right on health care could have catastrophic electoral consequences for the GOP next year.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo over the weekend that if Republicans don’t adequately deal with health care, “we’re going to get killed” in next year’s elections. “It’s about winning. We have to win the midterms.”
On the tax credits specifically, Republicans in Congress have staked out opposing positions on how to address the subsidies. A group of House moderates previously signed on to a one-year extension, while others would prefer to let the tax credits expire altogether — noting that Republicans never voted for them in the past.
GOP leaders have floated reforming the subsidies with income caps and stricter measures to root out “waste, fraud and abuse.” A bipartisan group of House centrists earlier this month proposed a plan that would extend the subsidies for two years and implement income caps.
But Republicans have been floating other reforms that could be tougher to get Democrats to agree to, such as adding Hyde Amendment-like provisions to prevent the funds from flowing to abortion providers.
“You can’t be funding abortion with these new subsidies that they’re talking about putting back in again. You’ve got to have Hyde protections in order for anything to happen at all,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said last week.
Beyond Congress, the Economic Policy Innovation Center and Paragon Health Institute — two younger, more nimble think tanks — have been most active in publishing papers and findings about the subsidies most relevant to congressional Republicans’ immediate policymaking. But few other conservative outside organizations are concertedly pressing health care policy issues or offering a marketable vision for health care.
Conservative groups have been roiled by health care policy disappointments in the past. Former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) was pushed out as president of the Heritage Foundation in 2017 in part because the board blamed him for not better positioning the conservative think tank to push for a full repeal of the health care law, The New York Times reported at the time.
Some outside voices on the right would prefer to avoid the subsidy issue from being used as a “nonstop political weapon with which to bludgeon Republicans,” as Breitbart Washington Bureau Chief Matt Boyle posted on the social platform X last week, suggesting a long-shot solution that Republicans would undoubtedly dismiss: “The GOP should counter by offering to make them permanent or a decade long extension. Disarm the Democrats.”
Welcome to The Movement, a weekly newsletter looking at the influences and debates on the right in Washington. I’m Emily Brooks, House leadership reporter at The Hill.
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HAS THE DUST SETTLED AT HERITAGE?
A week and a half after his initial defense of Tucker Carlson’s interview with antisemitic fringe commentator Nick Fuentes, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — who has since apologized for and walked back his initial statements — is waiting for the dust to settle and stressing that he will stick around.
Roberts told some Heritage staff in a meeting on Monday that despite calls from outside critics and staff inside the organization to step aside, he is not going anywhere, the organization is moving on, and that the press cycle will soon focus on something else, a source told me. That comes after Roberts publicly said he had decided to stay at Heritage.
As the organization works to move forward, Andy Olivastro, Heritage Foundation’s chief advancement officer, sent an email on the recent controversy to the organization’s outside partners on Friday, which I obtained.
“The Heritage Foundation is rooted in principles and policies, not personalities. We will not make the mistake of placing individuals—even friends—above the critical mission of the institution that all of us are entrusted to steward,” Olivastro said.
It has been a brutal week for Heritage and Roberts. He faced extensive criticism from employees in a leaked all-staff meeting last week. An antisemitism task force that Heritage helped create severed ties with the think tank. Former Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann called for Roberts to be removed. Heritage scholar Chris DeMuth resigned from Heritage amid the turmoil, as did economist Stephen Moore, with Heritage offering friendly statements about each departure.
The Washington Post deeply reported on Heritage staff being in “open revolt.” CNN reported that a donor who contributes more than half a million dollars annually to the conservative think tank will no longer be giving to Heritage. The Wall Street Journal went in depth about the controversy as well.
Two board members did speak up in the immediate aftermath of the Carlson video without addressing it directly. Robert P. George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, critiqued the “no enemies to the right” ethos that Roberts alluded to in the video. And Heritage board trustee John Coleman, co-CEO at Sovereign’s Capital, wrote a post condemning antisemitism.
But as calls for Roberts to step down or be removed persist, and outside figures on the right chime in, the full Heritage Foundation board of trustees — chaired by Amway heir Barb Van Andel-Gaby — has been silent, in what can only be taken as implicit support for Roberts.
That has frustrated some people both inside and outside Heritage.
“The board has failed in its legal fiduciary obligation to protect the staff and the institution from harm,” one Heritage foundation staff member told me.
Roberts critics both inside and outside Heritage lament that its longtime president and co-founder, Ed Feulner — who stepped in to take the reins after Heritage ousted DeMint in 2017 — passed away this summer. Outside conservatives I’ve spoken to speculate that the board sees little upside to removing Roberts, not wanting to bow to the critics or bring even more negative attention on the organization.
The objections to Roberts go far beyond the recent controversy over Carlson, Fuentes and antisemitism. Tensions have simmered for years about Heritage’s shifts on foreign policy and on economics and tariffs under Roberts as he’s embraced the “New Right” and tried to take the organization in a more Trump-friendly direction. And the organization was, of course, excoriated by both Democrats and Republicans for promoting its Project 2025 book of policy proposals.
Roberts supporters say there is still plenty of support for him, as shown by some applause for him in the leaked staff meeting.
A Heritage spokesperson told me that since the think tank is a microcosm of the entire conservative movement with robust internal debates, it’s natural that there are conflicting viewpoints within the organization, and it makes sense that other outside organizations would have activism.
And the spokesperson said that contrary to claims that Heritage is taking a financial hit in wake of the controversy, fundraising last week was above average compared with weekly averages for this year.
IDEOLOGICAL BATTLE SPREADS TO ISI
The ideological civil war has moved from the Heritage Foundation to another longtime conservative movement institution: The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), an organization dedicated to “educating for liberty” with educational programs and fellowships.
According to an “open letter to the Conservative Movement” posted on X on Monday evening, two members of the ISI’s board — former ISI president Christopher Long and former chairman Thomas Lynch — resigned at the end of a board meeting last Friday after they raised objections about the ideological direction of the organization.
“We hope our experience will serve as a wake-up call that the integrity and longstanding values of conservative institutions are being systematically and intentionally undermined by post-liberals who promote a ‘no enemies to the right’ mindset,” they wrote.
Long and Lynch expressed opposition to the organization’s new podcast, Project Cosmos, which featured neo-reactionary “Dark Enlightenment” writer Curtis Yarvin — who once wrote, “Although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.” And they lamented a $75,000 ISI fellow being funded at the Tucker Carlson Network. ISI President Johnny Burtka did not immediately respond to my request for comment late last night.
“What happened at Heritage and ISI in recent weeks underscores how a cadre of post-liberals has worked together, behind the scenes, to wrest control of conservative institutions from actual conservatives. They have quietly filled boardrooms with post-liberals, integralists, and other fellow travelers who disdain traditional conservatism’s central tenets of free markets, limited government, individual liberty, and personal responsibility,” the open letter said.
Figures on the MAGA, “New Right” and national conservatism wing quickly responded with dismissals of the open letter and defenses of ISI.
ON MY CALENDAR
- Friday, Nov. 21: The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity hosts its Freedom & Progress 2025 conference in downtown Washington, D.C.
THREE MORE THINGS
- Scoop: Leadership Institute President Morton Blackwell weighed in on the Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes debate that has roiled the conservative movement. In an email to all staff on Friday that I obtained, Blackwell lauded conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s assessment of the Carlson/Fuentes dynamic and flaunted that the organization was “the first conservative organization to identify, expose, and expel Nick Fuentes from our programs” years ago.
“The question is whether moral people and serious institutions should associate with or legitimize ideas that contradict the foundational principles of ordered liberty and human dignity,” Blackwell wrote to staff. He ended the email: “Nick Fuentes and anyone who attempts to promote, excuse, or normalize his hateful views have no place at the Leadership Institute.”
Blackwell told me the email speaks for itself.
- The Heritage Foundation drama could get awkward for the New Mexico Mercenaries softball team, which included think-tankers on both sides of the Heritage Foundation drama, I’m told. Those include Ryan Neuhaus, the now-departed Heritage chief of staff, and Amy Swearer, a Heritage senior legal fellow who questioned the leadership of Roberts at the all-staff meeting last week. This is a serious team that won the House Softball League this year in an undefeated season, and has placed in the top four every year since 2022.
Perhaps sports can heal the wounds from the Heritage ideological battle?
- President Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has “lost her way,” my colleague Julia Manchester reports. Trump said he was surprised by Greene’s statements and suggested she had some “act going.” “I don’t know what happened to Marjorie. Nice woman, but she’s lost her way,” he said. Greene has accused the president of focusing more on foreign affairs than on matters at home.
WHAT I’M READING
- New York Times’s Clyde McGrady: Nick Fuentes’s Rise Puts MAGA Movement in a ‘Time of Choosing’
- Washington Examiner’s Byron York: Dick Cheney’s complicated legacy
- The New Yorker’s Antonia Hitchens: Laura Loomer’s Endless Payback
- Ali Holcomb in the Washington Examiner: How conservatives can win back women
