On Monday, MLive reported that Rep. Justice Amash (R-MI), a libertarian-minded conservative increasingly at odds with President Donald Trump, said he “can’t rule out” abandoning the GOP — and running against Trump on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2020:
“I think my message does resonate with a lot of people,” said Amash, now in his fifth Congressional term. “There are people who are tired of the way it works and are coming to understand that the problem is this two-party duopoly and the partisan fighting that is nonstop. If people came to Washington with strong ideologies but less partisanship this would be a lot better.”
Amash, who was first elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, had harsh words for many of the Republicans who were elected alongside him and preaching the same thing he was: “It turns out a lot of them were not in favor of limiting the size of government, they were just opposed to the president at the time … [the Tea Party] was replaced with nationalism and protectionism and the general philosophy of the party now under Trump.”
Amash, who calls himself the “the only libertarian in Congress,” agrees with the GOP on things like tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulating guns. But he has bucked the party on a number of other issues, from criticizing the Supreme Court appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to opposing the declaration of a national emergency to divert military funding to construct a border wall.