Justin Amash
WARNING: POLITICS.
The focus of this blog will be on The Castle, of course, but also its surroundings — Grandville, Grand Rapids, West Michigan more broadly. This has always been my home, and the story I want to tell extends past the concrete walls and the blue roof of my apartment building here.
Grand Rapids is rather anonymous nationally.
The metro area has just over a million people, so it isn’t a small town, ranking around 50th nationally, among places like Hartford, Buffalo, Birmingham, Rochester, Tucson, Fresno, Tulsa, and Honolulu. GR is the second city in a moderately populated state, but few people outside of the region have heard of it. Michigan, insofar that as it exists in the national consciousness, is known for Detroit and the Great Lakes. When I lived in Houston, almost nobody was familiar with Grand Rapids — though they did love that I could point it out on my hand.
But every few years, West Michigan gains an inflated importance relative to its peers as a purple region in a swing state. American political discourse tends to define the country by its red-and-blue maps at the state and county level. Michigan slid from “reliably blue” to “competitive” as the Rust Belt lurched rightwards in 2016, which was the first time the state voted Republican since 1992 and Trump’s narrowest margin of victory in any state. Trump and Clinton each spent some of the last nights of that campaign in the GR area, holding events at the DeltaPlex Arena and on Grand Valley State’s campus.
Trump returned for a midnight rally at the Gerald R. Ford Airport late in the 2020 race, but lost Michigan and the election to Biden. Elections tend to dominate coverage of politics in America, with endless speculation beforehand and narratives imposed afterwards. Much of the liberal media reacted to Trump’s election with performative efforts to understand why the Midwest supported him — efforts that were as misguided as they were steadfast. Those narratives often focused on reactionary cultural grievance and tales of industrial decline. Grand Rapids received a little bit of attention over the last few years and as part of the 2020 race; Kent County is the historical heart of conservatism in Michigan and has become a purple county in a purple state.
In the end, Biden won Kent County by six points, and Grand Rapids became anonymous again.
Conservatism in Grand Rapids and across the country was refocused through the lens of Donald Trump: his reactionary grievance, shameless lying, white revanchism, open combativeness. Most of the conservative movement, especially within the GOP, marched in lockstep with Trump after his shock victory over Clinton. Very few conservatives rebelled against him.
West Michigan produced a few notable figures in the Trump extended universe. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was the most visible, a rare cabinet appointee who (almost) survived from the beginning to the end of his administration. Her marriage to Dick DeVos united rich families; her father, Edgar Prince, founded an automotive supplier down the road in Holland; her brother, Erik, founded Blackwater, a mercenary group that famously committed war crimes in Iraq. Erik briefly made headlines early during Trump’s term, and he pardoned Prince’s men for the Nisour Square Massacre.
For generations, the DeVos family and their Amway pyramid scheme money have wielded significant political influence in Grand Rapids and beyond, financing evangelical organizations and GOP political projects. Forays into the public space haven’t gone well. Dick was defeated by an incumbent Jennifer Granholm in the 2006 gubernatorial race. Betsy, who had no experience whatsoever in the public school system, became widely despised among teachers. She often betrayed her incompetence and disdain for the public, but her appointment was the culmination of a decades-long political project to weaken public education on the behalf of religious and for-profit private schools.
Another West Michigander, Pete Hoekstra, became Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands. Hoekstra is a former congressman from the lakeshore MI-02 district, who gained notoriety as chair of the House Intelligence Committee during the Iraq War. He was trounced in a 2012 Senate race by Debbie Stabenow after airing a cartoonishly racist Super Bowl ad. In an interview that briefly went viral, Dutch media confronted Ambassador Hoekstra about inflammatory lies he made while speaking in 2015 regarding Muslim aggression and “no-go zones” in the Netherlands. He declared those comments to be fake news, then was shown a clip of the panel where he made them. Later in the interview, he denied ever having used the term fake news, and the interviewer asked him if he wanted to see that clip as well.
DeVos represents the presence of GOP financiers and the religious right in the Trump coalition, their reluctant assent and eventually enthusiastic support; Hoekstra represents how buffoonish Bush-era protofascism found a host in Trump’s open racism and authoritarian posturing.
Justin Amash represents something more complicated. The congressman, a libertarian from MI-03, won’t go down in history beyond his vote to impeach Trump, an ultimately inconsequential gadfly. But Amash’s presence on the political scene traces a strain of conservatism that complicates the alignment of the GOP under Trump.
Amash was born in Grand Rapids to immigrants from Palestine and Syria; they settled down in Kentwood and sent him to Grand Rapids Christian (which built a new chapel with a huge DeVos family donation when he attended). He earned degrees from the University of Michigan, both undergrad and law, before briefly working for the largest corporate law firm in GR. Clearly he wanted a career in politics: he spent a little bit of time consulting for his family’s business before getting elected to the Michigan State House. Amash was there for just two years before replacing longtime representative Vern Ehlers in Gerald Ford’s old congressional seat. He was 30 at the time.
The local Republican machine, including the DeVos family, was happy to back Amash and his political aspirations. Even in his short time in state government, Amash developed a reputation as a libertarian fanatic. He was an avatar for the 2010 Tea Party wave: a fresh face intensely committed to opposing taxation and government spending. During his tenure as a congressman, Amash helped form the House Freedom Caucus, a radical bloc of GOP legislators who were opposed to their Speaker of the House, John Boehner.
Many founding members of the Freedom Caucus (Mark Meadows, Mick Mulvaney, Ron DeSantis, and Jim Jordan) eventually either worked directly for Trump or became prominent supporters of his. The Freedom Caucus stopped agitating against party moderates and swung towards vociferous, unconditional support of the president. Amash may have once thought that he had been collaborating with like-minded hardline conservatives, but their fealty to Trump proved otherwise with his capriciousness, opposition to “free trade,” and lack of ideological mooring in general.
Of course, it was much easier to take a confrontational posture when Democrats were driving the legislative agenda. Amash and his compatriots publicly opposed the GOP healthcare plan in 2017, but he was alone in many of his other criticisms: the same type of executive overreach often derided as tyranny by the group, unauthorized bombings in Syria, and budgets that he believed to be profligate. He often lamented the procedural breakdowns in Congress that led to power being consolidated within party leadership, though he acquiesced when Ryan, McConnell, and Trump rushed legislation cutting taxes on the wealthy.
Justin Amash has sincere libertarian values — and he was infamously pedantic too, committed to explaining each vote in depth. Those traits have won him some respect locally across the political spectrum — everybody knew that he operated ideologically and knew that he wasn’t a cynical politician. Everybody knew that he took each vote seriously. Amash’s legislative record wasn’t typical for a Republican. While his positions were consistent with party consensus on subjects like abortion, free trade, the social welfare state, and taxation, he had some heterodox views. He was a contrarian when it came to bipartisan surveillance and militarism; he defied his party when it came to the death penalty and criminal justice reform, like marijuana decriminalization and ending qualified immunity and civil asset forfeiture. Towards the end, he found an unlikely alliance with democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with their shared apprehensions towards state power, reluctance to adhere to their respective party lines, and sincere appreciation of the legislative process.
All that said, Amash’s political and economic theories do have some holes. When applied practically, especially within the apparatus of the GOP, libertarian buzzwords like freedom and liberty often mean the freedom to exploit labor, especially abroad, or the liberation of billionaires from modest tax burdens. The interests of wealthy oligarchs and massive corporations sometimes stand against the interests of society at large; empowering coercive behavior from those entities actually diminishes the liberty and freedom of most people in a practical sense. So too does Amash’s belief that abortion should be illegal. Perhaps Amash is best encapsulated by his position on climate change: he accepts that human behavior is driving global warming, but has argued that the federal government has no authority to slow it down. Amash’s commitment to his understanding of freedom and the role of government in society — which evidently includes the freedom to engineer apocalyptic climate change for profit — can be myopic to the point of being unserious.
Just like many self-professed libertarian Republicans abandon the idea of “small government” when it comes to the military-industrial complex or the dynamics of law enforcement and incarceration in America, many constitutional conservatives abandoned their obligation to hold the executive branch accountable for misconduct when faced with impeaching a Republican for obvious misconduct.
Amash, to his credit, was the exception.
He rose to brief prominence after posting a twitter thread about the much-anticipated 2019 Mueller Report. The first tweet in the thread had four points: that Attorney General William Barr had misrepresented the report in a summary to Congress, that Trump engaged in impeachable conduct, that partisanship had eroded the constitutional system of checks and balances between branches of government, and that few members of Congress had actually read the report. In the rest of the thread, Amash seemed aware that Republicans would never hold Trump accountable for any crime, though he refrained from direct criticism of his colleagues and framed that unconditional support as a consequence of partisan politics. In acknowledging that the supposed checks and balances of the US government could not stand in the face of a united political faction across its branches, Amash posed the crisis as an existential threat to democracy.
He was swiftly rebuked. Trump, in tweets of his own, called Amash a total lightweight and a loser who opposed Republican values. The Freedom Caucus put out a statement distancing themselves from him. Not a single Republican in congress joined Amash in claiming that Trump had committed impeachable conduct, and within two months, he left the party with a 4th of July announcement in the Washington Post. He never mentioned Trump directly in that op-ed. Instead, Amash lamented the decline of a governmental system that he viewed to be in grave peril. He criticized the GOP specifically, but again identified the core issue as partisanship. Trump celebrated his departure, calling Amash one of the dumbest and most disloyal men in Congress and noting that he’d already drawn primary challengers.
Maybe Amash thought that he’d be joined by some fellow Republicans who’d grown alienated by Trump and their party’s support of him. If there were any, they didn’t announce themselves.
Maybe he didn’t have much of a plan; maybe he sensed that he was at an important historical moment and wanted to make his mark. Regardless, Amash was alone. He eventually joined the Libertarian Party. Predictably, Trump survived that impeachment in the Senate. Amash made headlines again when he announced that he was exploring a 2020 run for president, but he quickly backtracked. That move drew criticism from across the political spectrum; Republicans mocked it as hopeless grandstanding, centrists and liberals aligned against Trump were paranoid he’d siphon votes from Biden. Amash decided not to pursue a third-party run in MI-03, ending his decade-long congressional tenure.
It’s hard to speculate as to what calculus informed that decision not to run for Congress again. His opponents would have been Republican Peter Meijer (the scion of a local grocery store magnate) and Democrat Hilary Scholten (a former lawyer in Obama’s Justice Department). It’s likely that a third-party run from Amash could have fractured the conservative vote and thrown the election to Scholten. Considering how many Republicans despised Amash after he turned on Trump, it feels unlikely that he would have cobbled enough votes to win. It could have been the first time in generations that Grand Rapids was represented by a Democrat in Congress. The pundit mindset leads one to pondering possible political reasons for why Amash didn’t run, or possible outcomes that could have happened if he did. In the end, Amash wasn’t on the ballot. Maybe he was so disillusioned with Congress that he didn’t want to be there anymore.
Meijer won by six points. His district was gerrymandered after the Tea Party wave hit the Michigan legislature. They generously carved out Wyoming and Kentwood (the two most diverse suburbs in the Grand Rapids area), attaching them to Pete Hoekstra’s old district, currently represented by Bill Huizenga. Scholten actually beat Meijer by a narrow margin in Kent County, but the sparsely populated, conservative counties of Ionia, Barry, and Calhoun provided enough votes to carry Meijer to victory. Meijer stores are ubiquitous in Michigan — a grocery chain turned big box superstore, a bit nicer than WalMart. It’s a very Dutch name.
Unfortunately, Peter Meijer is an apt avatar for politics in West Michigan, the next in a line of local royalty wielding this little fiefdom’s power. Meijer’s first and only consequential action in Congress was to vote yes on Trump’s second impeachment charge for leading an insurrection against the government — though he was one of just ten Republicans to do so this time. He seemed genuinely upset by the attempted putsch at the capitol, and blamed people in his party for it. Maybe if the conduct of the president and his colleagues genuinely bothers him, Meijer will leave the GOP too.
In his time in Congress, Amash offered some contrast with mainstream conservatism. His ideological background aligned with the interests of the GOP’s wealthy donor base, and the Tea Party’s confrontational posture suited his oppositional tendencies. At least early on in his tenure, Amash was little more than a pawn in the conservative project, dutifully carrying out his role in attempting to erode the power of government for the benefit of the capitalist class. But he was an irritant, often criticizing party leadership and voting against his caucus when it came to certain topics — or even procedural issues with the legislation. Surely party leadership found him irksome.
Those conflicts were never meaningful enough to risk alienating the GOP and its financiers or drawing a primary challenger for his House seat. That his eventual rupture came shortly after he announced his intention to vote in favor of impeaching Trump showed exactly where the party was willing to draw the line.
Amash’s decade in Congress highlights the radicalization of the conservative movement, and his consistent, idiosyncratic position provides a frame of reference from which changes in the GOP can be seen. From the visceral opposition to Obama, to the rise of Trump, to the widespread refusal to accept the results of an election, America’s reactionary id has grown bolder and angrier. In 2015, the Republican electorate chose from a wide variety of primary candidates — and the base picked the candidate who’d traded dog whistles for bullhorns. Whatever internal opposition there once was faded after Trump was elected, maybe save for a few mild criticisms from retiring senators. The party chose to become complicit with Trump’s lying, invective, and corruption; he passed tax cuts on the rich, tried (and failed) to repeal Obamacare, and appointed radicals to several judgeships, including three on the Supreme Court; in return, Republicans tolerated his ineptitude and misbehavior. A lot of them even liked it.
The right’s reaction to Trump’s loss — both at the fringe and within the halls of power — doesn’t bode well for a return to “moderate” Republican politics. Trump will continue to exert some degree of influence after office and could even run for president again. Plenty of future Republicans will try to mimic his style of politics, and GOP voters will continue to prefer more extreme candidates. Far more elected Republicans echoed Trump’s deranged lies about a “stolen” election than those who pushed back against them. It doesn’t look like he’ll face consequences for fomenting a mob to attack Congress in an explicit attempt to maintain power. The future of the GOP looks grim, regardless of Trump’s role in the party moving forward.
Amash didn’t want to be part of that future. Some conservatives did. I spent a lot of time during the Trump era discussing politics with my dad and my former roommate, both ex-Republicans who hated Trump for a variety of reasons. They’re far outnumbered by those who supported him. But Amash does represent a bloc of voters with conservative attitudes who believe that the GOP has betrayed their values to indulge a maniac — voters who are happy to walk through the right door of a big Democratic tent and support the more conservative flank of that party instead.
I wonder what’s next for Amash himself. I wonder if he’ll try to run for public office again, if he’ll invest his career in building a third party apparatus to challenge the GOP from the right, if he’ll return to the family business, or if he’ll find his way into a job in the political world bankrolled by the same type of folks who backed him early in his career. Amash did alienate a lot of his donors, including the DeVos family, by publicly opposing Trump. Maybe a lucrative consulting role somewhere in the swamp won’t be available for him anymore.
The stand Amash took against Trump ultimately proved to be meaningless. Only one other Republican (Mitt Romney, who was in the Senate) joined Amash in his vote to impeach, and Trump survived that first impeachment. Amash discovered that his allies weren’t committed to the same principles that he was and became estranged from the party. That he took that stand begs the question of why nobody else in the House did. If anything, Amash was the exception that proved the rule: one of just two conservatives who opposed Trump’s lawlessness and authoritarian behavior instead of supporting it.
Amash was my representative until I moved into The Castle. I figured that he did the most consequential things he could have done in his position, and that his failure to garner support from other Republicans was more of an indictment of them than him. Like a lot of other people, I respected his consistency, even though I don’t agree with him on a lot of issues or operate from the same ideological framework that he does. I appreciated him for opposing Trump. Amash was committed to his principles despite external pressure; he was one of the few politicians who seemed to be advocating for an idea instead of simply supporting his party or trying to advance his career. When it came to the most significant political issue of his time in office, Amash may have sacrificed his future, but he held true — more than can be said of most. When future history books trace the radicalization of the GOP, he deserves a mention for refusing to abide.