Rep. Kevin Kiley has spent six months as the only independent in the US House while still sitting in the Republican conference. He says that ends next year. In an interview last week, Kiley said he does not plan to caucus with Republicans if voters in California's 6th District send him back to Washington.
Asked directly whether he would stay with the GOP, Kiley answered "No," and said he is working to eliminate what he called a "crazy policy" requiring members to formally join one caucus or the other just to receive committee seats. "The committee seats should belong to the American people," he said.
The announcement is about more than one congressman's affiliation. It puts a spotlight on the machinery party leaders use to keep members in line, and it lands just as a group of independent Senate candidates is promising to use a closely divided chamber to take that machinery apart.
How Kiley Got Here
Kiley left the Republican Party in March after California’s Proposition 50 dismantled his district, as a part of the mid-cycle redistricting struggle between the two major parties. He became the first independent in the House since Justin Amash of Michigan, who dropped his Republican affiliation in 2019. But he said at the time that he would keep caucusing with House Republicans for the rest of the term because committee assignments are tied to party affiliation.
Those committee assignments included a gavel: He chairs the House Education & Workforce subcommittee, and doing so required him to affiliate with the Republican Conference.
Before the Semafor interview, Kiley had already taken the fight to the committee that writes the rules. He proposed before the House Rules Committee that a member outside either party should be guaranteed one committee assignment from a list of their choice, plus a second on request. He also proposed that a member who leaves a party should keep existing committee and subcommittee seats rather than having them automatically vacated.
"Committee seats should not be the property of the parties," he told the panel.
What a Caucus Actually Is
A caucus is a private organization of members from the same party, or of members who agree to “caucus” with that party for management purposes. They are not defined in the Constitution. Rather, the parties adopt rules around these caucuses/conferences, and they invest tremendous power in them.
Caucuses elect their own leaders, who become the Speaker, majority leader, or minority leader, depending on which party has a majority. They nominate members for committee seats, which the full chamber then ratifies. They decide who chairs committees and subcommittees, which determines what bills get hearings and markups. They control staff budgets, office space, and the floor schedule.
For a member in good standing, the benefits are substantial: a path to leadership on the committee, seniority that compounds over years, campaign money from the party committees, and a seat at the table when the agenda is set. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Angus King are independents in name, but because they caucus with Democrats, they receive committee seats and seniority as if they were Democrats.
And as much as these caucasus empower members, they can be used to disempower those who go against the caucus's leadership.
The Leash in Practice
In December 2012, Rep. Tim Huelskamp learned that he and three other Republicans had been stripped of key committee assignments by the House Steering Committee, which was under Speaker John Boehner's control. Huelskamp and Amash were removed from the Budget Committee, while David Schweikert and Walter Jones lost their Financial Services seats.
Huelskamp said Boehner told the conference the moves were about "voting patterns," not ideology, and warned that more members could be targeted. The three conservatives wrote to Boehner asking for any vote scorecard used against them. Boehner replied that there was no scorecard or single criterion behind committee assignments.
Huelskamp's read on the purpose was blunt: with a large majority, three or four votes didn't matter, but punishing a few members could warn the rest of the conference. One of those four was Amash, who seven years later would become the last House independent before Kiley.
The Senate works differently in form but not in substance. At the start of each Congress, the chamber adopts an organizing resolution setting committee ratios and chairmanships based on which party has the majority. How much that depends on a single senator's caucus choice was demonstrated in 2001. With the Senate split 50-50, Vermont's Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party to become an independent who caucused with Democrats. Tom Daschle became majority leader, and Republican committee chairs had to vacate their offices for Democratic successors. One senator's caucus decision moved every gavel in the chamber.
Such power can give members of Congress tremendous power, if they can leverage it in a closely divided chamber.
The Fulcrum Candidates' Promise
That is the leverage a group of independent Senate candidates is now building a strategy around. Six of them call it the Fulcrum Caucus: win enough seats that neither party can organize the Senate without them, then set terms before helping anyone do it.
The candidates frame the pledge as a tool for reform, not just a posture. Todd Achilles (running in Idaho) told IVN he would not caucus with Chuck Schumer because, in his words, "he is the problem." Brian Bengs (running in South Dakota) told CNN that if independents become the fulcrum, both parties would need them, "and there's going to be a price for that," which he defined as good-government reforms. Osborn has pitched the same idea to Nebraska voters as working for them rather than for a party boss.
Ty Pinkins (running in MS) has offered the most detailed account of what that price would be. In an interview for this series, he pointed to January 3, 2027, when the new Senate must adopt its rules, as the moment of maximum leverage. His asks target party leadership directly: an independent Senate leader with the same floor time, resources, and access as the Democratic and Republican leaders; and rules shielding independent bills on health care, redistricting, and Citizens United from partisan poison-pill amendments. "They have to come and find enough independents to give them a majority," he said. "And that is not free."
Why It Matters
The caucus system survives in part because almost no one outside Congress knows it exists. Committee seats, gavels, and floor time are distributed by private party organizations, and the threat of losing them has been used to discipline members who vote the way they promised voters they would.
Kiley's announcement and the Senate candidates' pledges are aimed at the same target from two directions. Kiley is asking the House to write independents into its rules. The Fulcrum Caucus Senate candidates are betting that if they hold the deciding votes, they won't have to ask. Either way, the question for 2027 is no longer only which party controls Congress. It is whether the parties should be the only ones allowed to organize it.