Justin Amash: The Career Anti-politician

By Dominic Pino

Friday, January 19, 2024

 

Justin Amash is a career politician who doesn’t like politics. It’s a perplexing vocation that voters have already coaxed him out of once. One hopes they will do it again.

 

His foreign-policy views leave much to be desired, but his economic-policy views are commendable. This isn’t about policy, though. It’s about the wide gap between Amash’s affect and his achievements.

 

Amash was first elected in the Tea Party wave in 2010. He was one of the top libertarian-minded young Republicans, the kind of guy who can quote Hayek while being the only dissenting vote on some mindless, bipartisan expansion of government.

 

This seemed like a promising change to politics as normal — at first. But now we can look back on Amash’s ten-year career in the House, and how it ended, and find that he accomplished, well, nothing.

 

Amash presents himself as principled above all else. He would always explain his votes on social media. He prided himself on his near-perfect attendance for roll-call votes. His sincerity is not in doubt, but neither is his ineffectiveness as a politician.

 

In ten years in Congress, the only bill Amash sponsored that became law was to rename a post office. He made no efforts to climb in House leadership and was never chairman or ranking member on any committee. He’d probably say the people in leadership stink. In many cases, he’d probably be correct about that. But to make a difference in Congress, representatives need to be committee chairmen or members of party leadership.

 

Of course, everyone can’t be in leadership, and most representatives don’t try to climb the ranks in that way. But they don’t tend to build a political brand around being the only principled guy in the room and expressing strong opinions about how Congress should be run better.

 

Amash never shuts up about it. He constantly criticized every speaker under whom he served (John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Nancy Pelosi). He writes and speaks about institutional problems with Congress and the need for fundamental reforms to the way the legislative branch works.

 

He makes a lot of strong points. Boehner, Ryan, and especially Pelosi deserved criticism. But rather than work within existing institutions to bring about positive change, Amash effectively alienated just about everyone else he served with. This concluded with his leaving the Republican Party to become a Libertarian in his last term.

 

That’s his right, and he’s a smart guy who could have made a difference leading an institution like the Libertarian Party in a time when voters’ dissatisfaction with the two major parties is high. The LP won 4.5 million votes with two former governors on its presidential ticket in 2016.

 

Now it’s hard to find anyone in polite society willing to associate with the organization. In 2022, the Libertarian National Committee was taken over by the so-called Mises Caucus, populated by hyper-online edgelords with no interest in winning voters, and several state-level parties splintered in the chaos.

 

Amash became the first and only LP member of Congress in the middle of his term in 2020. He was in a position to lead the LP and entertained the idea of being its presidential nominee. But that institution, like Congress before it, apparently wasn’t worth Amash’s efforts. He didn’t run for president and left Congress rather than try to win an election as a Libertarian.

 

But that didn’t stop him from continuing to commentate on Congress. When Kevin McCarthy failed to win the speakership on the first vote in 2023, Amash swooped in to save the day, traveling to Washington to offer himself as a candidate for speaker. He announced his candidacy with a lengthy Twitter thread of specific reforms he wanted to make in how the House is run. In the 15 speakership ballots, Amash received zero votes.

 

Now, he is looking at running for public office again, as a potential candidate for Senate from Michigan. “Preserving liberty means telling the Republican Party and the Democratic Party that we’ll no longer let them play their partisan game at our expense,” Amash wrote when he decided to leave the GOP in 2019 and asked readers to “join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us.” But now he’s exploring a run in the Republican primary.

 

Amash is 43 years old. Much of his professional life is still ahead of him. He doesn’t have to keep running for office. But he has hardly done anything else so far. Between graduating from law school and winning his first election to the Michigan legislature at the age of 28, he worked briefly as a lawyer and then for his parents’ company. It’s been nothing but politics since then.

 

Amash likes to present himself as the solution to Congress’s problems, but he’s a perfect example of how the national legislature has transformed into a “parliament of pundits,” to use Jonah Goldberg’s term. Amash is more interested in commentating on politics than in participating in it effectively, as the ten years he already had in Congress demonstrated.