Justin Amash is a real Republican whose call for Trump impeachment matters: Conservative
Loyalty to one man is no test of being Republican. Amash is a proven conservative who supports tax cuts, opposes spending and votes against abortion.
Michigan Rep. Justin Amash is the only sitting Republican member of Congress to call for President Donald Trump’s impeachment. But House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California says he doesn’t count.
“He votes more with Nancy Pelosi than he ever votes with me,” McCarthy said of Amash in a television interview. “It's a question whether he's even in our Republican conference as a whole." Trump concurred, tweeting that Amash “opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy.”
Amash’s independent streak certainly predates Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller's report. But whether you agree with the fifth-term congressman on impeachment or not, he has supported his share of Republican policies. He has voted for tax cuts and opposed abortion. In fact, he has been most likely to buck the party when Republican leaders want to spend too much money — a fiscally conservative stand that got him tossed off the House Budget Committee — or grow the federal government.
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The leading conservative groups give Amash consistently high scores. Conservative Review, Americans for Prosperity and Eagle Forum all rate his voting record at or better than 90%. He has voted with the American Conservative Union 87% of the time over the course of his career. His Heritage Action lifetime rating is 86%. One government spending tracker lists him among the top savers of taxpayer money in the House.
On withdrawing from Syria and gradually drawing down American troops in Afghanistan, Amash actually supports the president’s position. This is more than can be said for most Republicans in the Senate and some of the most prominent members of Trump’s national security team. Amash has voted with Trump over 90% of the time in the current Congress, though he did oppose him more frequently when Republicans controlled the House.
Being Republican is not about loyalty to Trump
If being a Republican is about fiscal and social conservatism, a strong military that is used sparingly and only in defense of vital American interests, and defending the taxpayer from bloated budgets, spending and debt, Amash should qualify easily. If being a Republican is about loyalty to one man, that’s the only way to denigrate the 39-year-old’s GOP credentials.
We’ve been through this before. Presidential leadership is important in national politics, and Amash’s party is fond of Ronald Reagan’s “11th Commandment” — thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. Even so, as Democrat John F. Kennedy once said, "Sometimes party loyalty asks too much."
During George W. Bush’s presidency, Republican lawmakers with impeccably conservative voting records were often derided as “RINOs” for opposing Bush policies such as No Child Left Behind, the deficit-funded Medicare prescription drug benefit and, especially, the Iraq War. One candidate did very well in the 2016 Republican primaries by campaigning against many of those policies, including calling Iraq a “big, fat mistake.” That candidate was Donald Trump.
Just as the priorities of the Republican Party’s titular leader can change, so can political conditions. Amash was originally elected in 2010 as part of the Tea Party, a movement that was then seen as very much a positive for conservatives and Republicans. This anti-Barack Obama wave gave the GOP its congressional majorities.
Amash deserves bipartisan respect
Amash’s interpretation of the Mueller report can be reasonably second-guessed. But he has tried to hold Trump to the same standards Republicans applied to Obama and a small subset of conservatives tried to hold Bush to before that. For this, Amash deserves bipartisan respect.
Instead for his trouble, Amash will likely receive a primary challenger who will be able to tap into Trump’s national donor base — and could by next year bear the president’s Twitter stamp of approval. This, too, follows a recent precedent. Amash’s friend and ally Mark Sanford, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, was defeated in a primary last year under a similar set of circumstances, with Trump endorsing his challenger. Republicans went on to lose this House seat in November.
Despite the Trump-Amash feud, the Republican Party is still the most effective vehicle for libertarian-leaning and small-government conservatives like the Michigan lawmaker. Just compare the impact of Rep. Ron Paul’s losing campaigns for the GOP presidential nomination to the more muted response to Paul winning the Libertarian Party nomination in 1988.
Further depleting the ranks of such Republicans over a disagreement about how Trump has conducted himself in office is shortsighted. Today’s GOP needs all the independent thinkers it can get.
W. James Antle III is editor of The American Conservative. Follow him on Twitter: @jimantle
