Republican Establishment vs Justin Amash

In 2012, the Democrats decided to try beating Justin Amash with someone more socially conservative, an especially vile Blue Dog type (think Lipinski) named Steve Pestka. How much more conservative is Pestka? Amash isn't homophobic. Pestka is a real hater and refers to gay people in incredibly vicious ways ("fudge-packer," etc). They're both anti-Choice but Pestka doesn't allow for an exception for rape and incest and Amash does. When David Malone, PAC Director of Right to Life of Michigan was asked why they didn't endorse Amash that year, he said "Right to Life of Michigan PAC has chosen not to endorse the candidacy of Representative Amash in the 2012 primary election. While he was previously endorsed in the 2010 general election and during his time in the state legislature, his voting record in Congress led the state board of the Right to Life of Michigan PAC to decide to not endorse his candidacy in the upcoming election. In his first term in Congress, Representative Amash voted "present" twice on legislation to defund Planned Parenthood (America's leading abortion provider) and voted "no" on legislation to outlaw sex-selection abortions." Michigan Right to Life rated Pestka's voting record 100% when he was in the state legislature and he did join the extremists in voting to defund Planned Parenthood. Pestka was the only Democrat in a congressional race to win the Michigan Right to Life endorsement.

Blue America doesn't endorse Republicans but we urged our members in MI-03 to not vote for Pestka, who spent $2,076,680 to Amash's $1,193,611. Amash beat him handily:

In 2008, Obama beat McCain 49.7% to 48.6% in the district. Romney beat Obama in 2012-- 53.1% to 45.8%. And in 2016-- after Bernie won the district in the primaries-- Hillary was decisively beaten by Trump, 51.6% to 42.2%. The PVI is R+6. Most people in the district live in Kent County (Grand Rapids, Michigan's second biggest city). These were the totals on primary day, 2016:

• Bernie- 43,375
• Ted Cruz- 35,185
• Hillary- 25,899
• Kasich- 25,562
• Señor Trumpanzee- 22,742

The presidential election saw Trump win districtwide with 51.6% while Amash won his race among the same voters on the same day, beating Democrat Douglas Smith 203,545 (59.5%) to 128,400 (37.5%). When the Republican establishment has gotten behind primary challengers to Amash, they never got too close. In 2014, the last big one, the establishment helped recruit a multimillionaire businessman, Brian Ellis, and Amash beat him 39,706 (57.4%) to 29,422 (42.6%).

Trump allies-- basically the whole GOP-- were in freakout mode after Amash made the case for impeachment over the weekend. McCarthy and Scalise ran to Trump TV to attack Amash. You can imagine how Trump-- already getting testy with Fox-- feels about his base seeing and hearing stuff like this that they wouldn't normally see and hear. Watch Scalise attempt to reiterate all the false talking points that Fox viewers/the Trump base are brainwashed with. Not even a mention of Fox when responding to the first question, just the rote party line lies.



But that's just the beginning. The GOP also has another primary opponent for Amash, an obscure right-wing state Rep from Montcalm County, Jim Lower, who has to give up his state House seat to run. Lower's district has a tiny part of the MI-03 district's voters. Last year, for example, 210,525 people voted in the MI-03 congressional election and 48,925 people from Calhoun County voted. Way in the northeastern part of the district, Montcalm provided just 1,758 votes.

According to the Detroit Free Press, Lower says he's been planning to run for some time and had expected to make an announcement closer to July 4. Amash's tweet storm against Trumpanzee was too big an opportunity to forgo. Lower: "I am a Pro-Trump, Pro-Life, Pro-Jobs, Pro-2nd Amendment, Pro-Family Values Republican. Congressman Justin Amash tweets yesterday calling for President Trump’s impeachment show how out of touch he is with the truth and how out of touch he is with people he represents. He must be replaced and I am going to do it."

Like most Beltway reporters, the Washington Post's Isaac Stanley Becker is impressed that Amash "enlists social media to do something unusual: explain why he bucks his party in terms his constituents can understand." Amash explains his approach on his Facebook page: "I defend liberty and explain every vote here." According to Becker "The simple formula has turned the libertarian, who rode into the House on the tea party wave, into something of a sensation. In 2012, the Independent Voter Network called Amash the 'coolest member of Congress.'"

But Lower doesn't think he's cool at all. He accused him of joining hands with "radical liberals"-- naming Detroit Democrat Rashida Tlaib in particular-- "to try and bring down our President."

In an interview with Becker, Lower came off just like every other GOP zombie, admitting he hadn't read the Mueller report but has already decided there was "no collusion, no obstruction." A friend of mine in Congress told me she hasn't spoken to a single Republican who has read it other than Amash. "Trump tells them what to say, what to think and they're too scared to do anything else. So why bother reading hundreds of pages? Sometimes I ask myself," she continued, "how many of them have read the Constitution since graduating from high school."

On Sunday, Lower changed his profile picture on Facebook to an image of himself standing in front of a Trump 2020 banner.

Amash has stood under a different banner. At the top of his Facebook page, he has pinned a warning from President George Washington about the “baneful effects” of party loyalty, delivered in his farewell address in 1796.

...[Amash] served one term in the state House in Lansing before he was elected to Congress in 2010. There, he allied with hard-line conservatives to form the House Freedom Caucus, whose members have mostly fallen in line with Trump.

A darling of conservative and libertarian groups, Amash has only once faced a credible primary challenge. He beat his Republican rival, Michigan businessman Brian Ellis, in 2014 by nearly 15 percentage points. Trump won the district handily in 2016, even flipping one county that had been secured by Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012.

The congressman’s survival may now depend on whether he has cultivated devotion among voters sufficient to override their loyalty to the president. His political prospects run through Facebook, where he has labored to convince constituents that he is accountable to them at a time when public trust in the government is mired near historic lows.

His heterodox moves have been the ones requiring most careful explanation on social media. He bucks his party in not voting for measures he supports, such as approval of the Keystone XL pipeline or the preservation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, because he disagrees with the underlying legislative approach.

Social media, the very tool used by Trump in 2016 to bypass media and party gatekeepers and speak directly to voters, could be a bulwark against the president’s attacks. It could help test whether Republicans can break with their standard-bearer and survive. Each Facebook post, in which voters add comments and raise questions, serves as a miniature, and digitized, town hall. Amash has more than 136,000 followers on the platform, about one-fifth of the total number of people 16 and over in his district, according to census estimates.

“Social media is revolutionizing government and making Congress more accountable,” Amash said in 2012, when he emerged as a winner of a Republican new media challenge. “I use Facebook to explain every vote I take on the House floor, and I personally interact with my constituents online. This not only empowers people at home but also shapes me into a better Representative.”

The social networking site has also been a powerful tool of personal branding, helping Amash earn his nickname, “Mr. No,” based on the sobriquet “Dr. No” embraced by Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman whose small-government philosophy the Michigan lawmaker shares.

Amash uses Facebook to make Star Wars jokes and flaunt his literacy in emoji. Some of his posts are personal, thanking God for his family or extolling the memory of Friedrich von Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and apostle of the free market.

But mostly, he explains his “no” votes. No to executive action on immigration. No to federal aid to Flint, Mich., during the height of the water contamination crisis. No to budget plans to keep the government open. No to the National Security Agency’s dragnet collection of phone records.

He even declines to approve the record of House proceedings, protesting, “we are never given adequate time to review the Journal.”

On the question of impeachment, however, Amash answered in the affirmative. Not only did the president’s conduct meet the constitutional standard for impeachment, he argued, but the attorney general, William P. Barr, had “misled the public” about the special counsel’s findings as they pertained to Trump’s possible “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

“While impeachment should be undertaken only in extraordinary circumstances, the risk we face in an environment of extreme partisanship is not that Congress will employ it as a remedy too often but rather that Congress will employ it so rarely that it cannot deter misconduct,” the congressman wrote.

Instantly, voters took to the congressman’s Facebook to register their reactions, both positive and negative. He was by turns lauded as an independent thinker, with the best interests of the country at heart, and castigated as a turncoat, interested only in attention.

A professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., thanked him for representing the state with “honesty and honor.” Another woman wrote, “Thank you so much for the courage to speak the truth.”

But he was also told, “You’re fired,” and instructed by an incensed Republican to, “Register immediately as a Democrat and turn in your man card.” Several critics invoked his father’s Palestinian heritage in questioning his loyalty to the Trump and to the United States.

Amash has yet to respond.

Sunday, Seattle progressive Pramila Jayapal, an influential member of the House Judiciary Committee was on State of the Union and say that Amash's statement of conscience is "a watershed moment. For weeks, Speaker Pelosi has saying this needs to be bipartisan if it's going to move forward just from the practical perspective of impeachment moving forward. And I think Justin Amash coming on board means that there is now bipartisan support for really understanding the seriousness of what is in the Mueller report." Adam Schiff was on Face the Nation where he noted that Amash is showing "more courage than any other Republican in the House or Senate." But Pelosi is Trump's bulwark against impeachment and she is unmoved and unwilling to do her duty. She should be removed.

Amash's ProgressivePunch crucial vote score for 2019 is 42.86%. The next highest Republican score is 21.43%, a 3-way tie between Nrian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), John Katko (R-NY) and Will Hurd (R-TX). All wish they had the guts to make an announcement like Amash's. But what I wanted to point out is that there are two Blue Dog freshmen-- Kendra Horn (OK) and Xochitl Torres Small (NM)-- with the same score as Amash and five Democrats who vote less progressively than Amash. From terrible to worst:

• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)- 35.71
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)- 35.71
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)- 35.71
• Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)- 35.71
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)- 28.57

Cathy Albro, the garden variety Democrat who Amash beat in 2018, is running again. He'd beat her again if she's the nominee, but a more progressive Democrat, Doug Booth, has announced his candidacy as well. He's certainly not a DCCC-type candidate, more of an independent thinker. This morning, the first page of his website had this message:

"Having read the report, I am in agreement with Representative Justin Amash’s tweets regarding the Mueller Report. The acts committed by the President are impeachable while Attorney General Barr intentionally misled the American public on findings within the report. Amash has now joined a majority of Americans who have come to this same conclusion. Congress must take meaningful action now to ensure that behaviors exemplified by Trump will not become the status quo for the Office of the President.

There is no specific call for action in Amash’s series of tweets. I believe that the full unredacted report should be made available to the American people. Furthermore, Congress must begin additional investigations to address any findings of wrongful acts and formally begin the impeachment process.

Our district deserves a Representative whose words are followed by meaningful action. Upon election, I vow to focus on policies that benefit working families in our country and build a democracy that works for all Americans."

In a series of 10 rapid fire tweets late this afternoon, Amash made it clear he's not backing down. Here they are in a pre-tweet presenation:

He began simply enough, in answering a White House rationale for why Trump shouldn't be impeached: "People who say there were no underlying crimes and therefore the president could not have intended to illegally obstruct the investigation-- and therefore cannot be impeached-- are resting their argument on several falsehoods:"

1- They say there were no underlying crimes

In fact, there were many crimes revealed by the investigation, some of which were charged, and some of which were not but are nonetheless described in Mueller’s report.

2- They say obstruction of justice requires an underlying crime.

In fact, obstruction of justice does not require the prosecution of an underlying crime, and there is a logical reason for that. Prosecutors might not charge a crime precisely *because* obstruction of justice denied them timely access to evidence that could lead to a prosecution.

If an underlying crime were required, then prosecutors could charge obstruction of justice only if it were unsuccessful in completely obstructing the investigation. This would make no sense.

3- They imply the president should be permitted to use any means to end what he claims to be a frivolous investigation, no matter how unreasonable his claim.

In fact, the president could not have known whether every single person Mueller investigated did or did not commit any crimes.

4- They imply “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” requires charges of a statutory crime or misdemeanor.

In fact, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is not defined in the Constitution and does not require corresponding statutory charges. The context implies conduct that violates the public trust-- and that view is echoed by the Framers of the Constitution and early American scholars.

I found this nice meme a few times in Amash's Facebook page's comments section: