Justin Amash: The Last Republican in America
I first heard the name Justin Amash about a decade ago. My brother, who worked in the Michigan state legislature at the time, mentioned this young state House rep who had developed quite a reputation for sticking to his principles. They nicknamed him “Mr. No,” a riff on the “Dr. No.” nickname embraced by libertarian icon and former Texas congressman Ron Paul.
Amash spent two years in the Michigan legislature and got elected to Congress. The setting changed but the man didn’t: In Washington, he established himself as one of the most independent-mind members in the House, willing to defy his party, immune to the pull of partisan loyalty and self-preservation.
It wasn’t entirely a surprise when Amash became the first Republican to take the Mueller report seriously, absorb the overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing by the president, and publicly call for Trump’s impeachment. Still, it came as something of a shock when, soon afterward, Amash quit the Republican Party entirely.
That’s where things got interesting.
Amash’s story captures so much about the larger dynamics at play in American politics right now. What happens to the politician who bucks his party? Will voters reward honesty over partisan loyalty? Or will Amash become a cautionary tale?
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Justin Amash: The Last Republican in America
He was the first Republican to call for Trump’s impeachment. Now, he’s quit the GOP, and is betting his political future that there’s room in conservative politics for anything other than Trump
Rolling Stone | November 12, 2019
JASON PYE HAS NEVER TOLD anyone this story, not on the record. It’s about Justin Amash, the Michigan congressman. Earlier this year, Amash was the first Republican to call for President Trump’s impeachment. After his colleagues branded him a loser and a traitor, Amash quit the GOP and switched his party affiliation to independent, gambling his political future on the quixotic notion that there is room in conservative politics for anything other than Donald Trump.
Sitting at a coffee shop in the basement of the U.S. Capitol, Pye drops a snuff pouch in his lower lip (“Can’t get rid of all the redneck, right?”). A Georgia native who likes punk rock and to soup up guitars in his spare time, Pye is the top lobbyist for FreedomWorks, the anti-tax, pro-free-market libertarian group that scores members of Congress based on how sufficiently conservative their voting records are. Amash is one of the few lawmakers with a 100 percent lifetime score and one of Pye’s most reliable votes in Congress. Amash can also be infuriating. That’s where the story comes in.
In late 2017, having failed to repeal Obamacare, Republicans were desperate for a win. They chose tax cuts. For procedural reasons, they first had to pass a budget bill to get a vote on taxes. To the party leadership like then-Speaker Paul Ryan, the budget bill was a placeholder, a means to an end. To Amash, it was a mess of a bill larded with billions in new spending that would skyrocket the federal deficit.
Pye didn’t love the budget bill either, but without it, there were no tax cuts. So Pye blasted out an email pressuring members of Congress to support the bill; those that didn’t would take a hit to their score as a “true conservative.” When he got back from lunch, there was a banker’s box on the couch in his office. No note, no return address. Inside was every trophy FreedomWorks had awarded Justin Amash.
Politicians take tough votes all the time, holding their noses to get something passed. Only Amash would get so upset at being asked to compromise his beliefs that he would respond with a gesture any reasonable person would interpret as: Fuck you. “He really is one of the most principled lawmakers out there,” Pye says. “Sometimes, he’s principled to a fault.”
JUSTIN AMASH IS SITTING IN A PUB in a Norman Rockwell-esque town in his district, talking to me about principles. The way he tells it, he had no choice but to leave the Republican Party. It wasn’t all that hard of a decision, he says, and when you listen to him talk about what he believes and why he got into politics, you understand why. “My gratification comes from being true to the principles that I speak about,” he tells me. “At the end of the day, if I feel like I stuck to my principles, I go home happy.”
With his rimless glasses, boyish face, and habit of long-winded digressions, Amash brings to mind a junior professor gunning for tenure, the one with the punishing reading list and zero-tolerance attendance policy. He is, by his own admission, an introvert, which made him an outlier in the U.S. Congress even before he left the GOP. At one event I attended in his district, he sounded almost apologetic when he had to interrupt patrons at a local brewery to start a town-hall meeting. (As it happened, those patrons had come to hear him speak.) When he travels he prefers not to wear the lapel pin given to every member of Congress, most of whom have a Gollum-level attachment to their pins and keep them on everywhere they go.
A five-term congressman who represents a swath of West Michigan, Amash, 39, is about as conservative — albeit with a libertarian streak — as any politician in America. In 2015 he co-founded the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative and libertarian members who wanted changes to the way Congress operated and were willing to hold the federal government hostage to make their point. His office brims with awards from small-government groups like the Club for Growth and the National Taxpayers Union. Some congressional offices give visitors free tchotchkes from a local business in their district; Amash’s office hands out copies of Frédéric Bastiat’s 1850 treatise, The Law, an urtext of the libertarian movement. Asked to describe Amash, people who know him reach for words like “doctrinaire” and “purist” — and those are the people who admire him.