Justin Amash: The House's New Ron Paul [Archive] - Ron Paul Forums / Liberty Forest

compromise

04-02-2013, 04:19 AM

When it comes to the House of Representatives, Justin Amash is the new Ron Paul.

The Michigan congressman, only 32, sees himself as a leader of “the second generation” of Paulites in the lower chamber. Sen. Rand Paul moved quickly to present himself as his dad’s heir to libertarian faithful in recent months, but many in the movement see Amash as even purer than the younger Paul, and he’s gotten rave reviews for explaining all his votes on Facebook.

Now, with the opening of a Senate seat in Michigan, Amash must decide whether to pursue his dream of one day winning a spot in House leadership or to take a chance at winning statewide — and risk losing it all.

Part of his calculus is that the Senate already has Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah. While he sees the complexion of the Republican conference becoming more libertarian in the years to come, he knows there are still not that many high-profile, libertarian-friendly representatives.

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President Barack Obama carried his state by 9 points, even as Amash won a second term in his Grand Rapids district — once held by Gerald Ford — by 9 points.

“If I feel like I can make a bigger impact in the Senate, then that’s something I would certainly take a look at,” Amash said in an extended interview in his House office last week. “But it’s gone Democratic in a lot of federal elections, so you have to consider it very carefully.”

With the elder Paul’s retirement at the end of the year, Amash has taken on a more visible role in the House.

Republican leadership booted him off the Budget Committee in December. The “purge” elevated his stature on the right as a martyr who was willing to stand up to the establishment, even though members of the steering committee said he was not removed because of votes he took but for publicly taking whacks at other Republicans who voted with the team.

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He voted for Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) for speaker over John Boehner. Kentucky freshman Thomas Massie, another libertarian favorite backed by Ron Paul, voted for Amash to be speaker.

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 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.”

A big emphasis of this second generation is changing the perception that libertarians are focused on fringe miscellanea at the expense of pocketbook issues.

“Whereas Ron spent a lot of time focusing on a few important but maybe not ordinarily talked-about issues, like the Federal Reserve, we need to expand what people think of when they think of ‘libertarian’ or ‘constitutional conservative’ so that they understand it means opportunity for them, that we put bills on the table that cover a broad spectrum of issues,” said Amash.

He calls his relationship with Boehner “cordial” and describes his feud with leadership as generational.

“I’ve always gotten along with him personally, and he’s a nice guy,” said Amash. “He and a lot of the leadership team come from a different generation. They were first elected several years ago, sometimes decades ago, and it’s not surprising that their perspective is going to be different than a lot of the newer members.”

“The establishment-type Republicans, the ones who have really controlled the process here for the past 10, 20 years are the ones who have narrowed the base to the point where we have a very difficult time winning national elections,” he added.

Amash said “many of the freshmen members” told him he was an inspiration, even if they don’t agree on a lot of issues.

“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.”

Some House Republican staffers chuckle privately at Amash’s aspirations. They see him as obstinate and say he does not have the personality to ever win a leadership slot, no matter how much the House changes.

“At the end of the day, the Republican Party has to be a coalition between libertarians and conservatives,” said Amash. “That’s really the basis for the party.”

While Ron Paul earned his “Dr. No” reputation for opposing the zeitgeist, he cites some late-career legislative achievements (like a bill to audit the Federal Reserve) and believes there’s now opportunities to put points on the board.

“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, elected in the 2010 tea party wave, is an unlikely figure. He’s a second-generation American of Palestinian descent who graduated from law school in 2005.

Brian Doherty, a senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of “Ron Paul’s Revolution,” said the view among libertarians is that Amash has come into his own over the past few months.

“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.”

Earlier this year, before Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster, many hard-core libertarians were critical of the senator for endorsing Mitt Romney at the start of last year’s Texas GOP convention and for working too closely with the party’s leaders. Amash was even buzzed about as a potential libertarian alternative when it came to the 2016 presidential election.

In 2009, as he pondered a run for the House, Amash flew with two friends to Texas to meet with Ron Paul and his political adviser Jesse Benton.

Benton, who chaired Paul’s presidential campaign and is now managing Mitch McConnell’s reelectiom bid in Kentucky, has been a big Amash fan since — writing personal checks to support his campaigns.

“Justin’s a superstar,” said Benton. “The sky is the limit for him.”

D.C. Democrats feel confident they’ll be able to hold the Michigan Senate seat. They would love to run against Amash, who they feel could be defined as an extremist, but they acknowledge that he would activate the grass roots in a way no other Republican candidate could and might raise more money than anyone else.

Conventional wisdom among establishment Republicans right now is that Rep. Mike Rogers is the party’s best bet, but they do not expect the field to sort itself out for several months.

Liberty for All, a super PAC run by two 20-somethings, has said they will spend six figures as a baseline and maybe seven figures to support a Senate bid if Amash decides to run. They feel Amash is exactly the sort of Republican who can win in a blue state.

“Justin stands at a precipice as the person everyone’s looking to inherit and carry the ball further down the field than Ron Paul was able to,” said Preston Bates, Liberty for All’s executive director.

Ron Paul said he has no preference on whether Amash stays in the House or tries for the Senate. He recalled his failed attempt to move from the House to the Senate in 1984. After he lost, he didn’t get back to Congress until 1996.

“If he runs for the Senate, and is then not in the Senate or the House, that’s not so good,” said Paul.

Amash thinks his “fresh approach” could resonate better in Michigan than a traditional Republican.

“I would never consider running if I didn’t think I had a very good chance of winning,” he said. “I like Pete Hoekstra [the 2012 GOP Senate nominee], but continuing to run Republicans who are from that part of the party, which is more of the Old Guard establishment part of the party, isn’t going to result in any different outcomes.”

In Amash’s office hangs a print from “Alice in Wonderland.”

”I sometimes feel like Alice looking upon this craziness with bewilderment,” he said of Congress.

Didn't know Benton liked Amash that much.