Politico ;profiled
Michigan Rep. Justin Amash last night as the "new Ron Paul,"
and focusing on his forthcoming decision to seek--or not seek--a
Senate seat in 2014. (I am quoted in the story.)
Amash understands he could cut a more impressive national figure
in the Senate; but that counting on a statewide win in a state that
went for Obama by 9 percentage points is a bit of a risk.
Amash likes to rhetorically call himself a "moderate" compared
to what he paints as the country-destroying madness of endless debt
and civil liberties violations, but surely deep down he understands
that his libertarian leanings scare lots of voters. He'd certainly
be painted by the Democrats as the candidate out to destroy
Medicare, Social Security, the safety net, clean food and air, and
our national security if the Democratic Party had to fight him for
a precious Senate seat.
Some excerpts from the profile:
Amash is chairman of the House Liberty Caucus. There’s no formal
membership list, and Amash said about a dozen regular meetings are
held in his office. He hopes the group gets big enough someday that
they need to move to a bigger space.
“Ron Paul was an educational figure. He was out there really
presenting things that others had not been talking about,” he said.
“This next generation of liberty Republicans, like Rand Paul and
Mike Lee and Thomas Massie and Raul Labrador, we’re interested in
making sure that … we re-brand the Republican Party as a place that
is welcoming to people from across the political spectrum and
follows the founding principles of our country: limited government,
economic freedom, individual liberty.”
Ron Paul still digs the congressman he endorsed, with his
customary modesty:
Ron Paul praises Amash for being “very, very principled.” He
doesn’t believe they’ve spoken directly since he left Congress, but
he continues to monitor what’s going on in the Capitol.
“I’m sort of pleased with what’s happening in the sense that
it’s not just one person,” Paul said in a phone interview. “There’s
a group. I think they will have more influence than I ever
had.”......
“Some will deal mainly legislatively. Some will deal in a sense
of trying to educate and change people’s minds,” Paul said. “I
tried to do both, but I put more emphasis on trying to change
people’s opinions. … The group that’s in Washington now is going to
have tremendous opportunities because there’s a lot more
disenchantment.”
Amash is cautiously optimistic about his Party's future:
“When I say things are moving in the right direction, I wouldn’t
say that it’s legislatively moving in the right direction
necessarily,” he said. “But the makeup of the Republican conference
is changing in such a way that in five or 10 years, I think you’ll
see a very different emphasis from Republicans when it comes to the
legislation they present and very different for the party. And I
can see that starting. It’s very clear with the people who are
getting elected.”
Amash said he thinks about pursuing a spot in House leadership
if he stays.
“I often take sort of a mini-leadership role on the House
floor,” he said. “I represent an important Republican perspective,
and there are a lot of members who come to me on the House floor
and maybe even rely on me to provide an alternative perspective to
what they’re hearing from leadership. And 10 years from now, you
never know what that translates into.”
Reporter James Hohmann quotes me--accurately--supporting the
notion that Amash is the closest thing to a next Ron Paul in
Congress:
“He has a super stellar record of not pissing off the purists,”
said Doherty. “He really does seem to have that possibility of
really being a genuine next Ron Paul. … From a libertarian
perspective, he feels like the real deal in a way that almost no
one else does.”
Is Amash really the next Ron Paul? I think he's come closest to
toeing the full Ron Paul line in Congress. Amash likes to emphasize
civil liberties as well as more general "limited government" talk,
which is great, and his away-from-the-pack votes on many budget and
leadership issues show he's marking himself as more serious on debt
and spending than most of his Party.
There is a key issue I neglected to parse out with
Politico, and which the story doesn't emphasize: foreign
policy. It is certainly true Amash ;has a less expansive set of
beliefs about where and how to use U.S. power abroad, and is also
quick to say that a more limited foreign policy is an important
issue for his Party.
But his rhetoric about sanctions and the threat of Iran (as
expressed in the video interview with Nick Gillespie below) leave
more room for the possibility of U.S. belligerence in Iran than
most Ron Paul fans are comfortable with. That is, he's for certain
sanctions, though he thinks they should be crafted as best as
possible merely to keep dangerous things out of the regime's hands,
not the stuff of life from Iranian citizens hands. And he does seem
to think Iran is seeking a nuclear bomb, something many
non-interventionists of a Paulian bent think is likely not true,
and to boot believe that saying it is plays into the hands of those
spoiling for a war with Iran.
I don't think either statement proves he'll be unreliable on
making sensible decisions about when and where to wage war. But as
one vote out of 435 in a world where the President isn't even
likely to seek Congressional approval for any war that might begin,
lots of the Paul faithful find voting right on these
things less important than being a firm, loud, and consistent voice
that questions and tries to obstruct the presumptions and behavior
of the expansive American "national security" state anywhere and
everywhere.
But certainly in overarching vision of government and a seeming
absence of any desire to go along to get along with his Party to
seem a team player, Amash is building a good record, and the more
reputational juice like this story he gets, the more he will be
influential with colleagues who might be inclined to lean where the
wind blows. As I discussed with Hohmann, a point that didn't make
it into the finished story, true libertarian victories in
Washington can't just come from having more Murray Rothbard fans in
Congress: it has to come from having people who never heard of
Rothbard and would run from him if they had deciding that their
political future would be well served by voting along with people
like Amash, because that's where the Party's energy and enthusiasm
seems to be coming from.
I wrote a book about Ron Paul and the movement he inspired,
Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He
Inspired.
I interviewed Amash for Reason's March
package on liberty-leaning congressmen post-Ron Paul. I also
interviewed Amash for my February
Sunday New York Times ;essay on libertarian trends
in the Republican Party.
Nick Gillespie did a video interview for him for
Reason.TV, excerpts of which will appear in our June print
issue. Here's the video:
… Read More
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