Justin Amash

Justin Amash ( ; born April 18, 1980) is an American lawyer and politician who served as the U.S. representative for from 2011 to 2021. Originally a Republican, Amash joined the Libertarian Party in April 2020, becoming the party's first (and, , only) member of Congress.

A native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Amash was born to Palestinian and Syrian Christian parents who had immigrated to the United States. After high school, he studied economics at the University of Michigan, graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, and briefly worked as a corporate lawyer and consultant before entering politics.

Amash represented the 72nd district in the Michigan House of Representatives for one term before being elected to Congress in 2010. He was the founder and chairperson of the Liberty Caucus and was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, which he left in June 2019. Amash received national attention when he became the first Republican congressman to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump, a position he maintained after leaving the party. Amash left the Republican Party and became an independent in July 2019. In April 2020, he joined the Libertarian Party.

Amash formed an exploratory committee to seek the Libertarian Party presidential nomination in 2020. In May 2020, he announced that he would not run for president. Amash did not seek reelection to Congress in 2020.

Early life and education

Justin Amash was born on April 18, 1980, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the second of three sons born to Arab Christian parents who had immigrated to the United States. His father, Attallah Amash, is a Palestinian Christian whose family lived in Ramla until they were forcibly expelled by Israeli soldiers during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Attallah and his family immigrated to the United States in 1956 when he was 16 through the sponsorship of an American pastor in Muskegon, Michigan. Amash's mother, Mimi, is a Syrian Christian who met his father through family friends in Damascus, Syria, and the two married in 1974.

Amash grew up in Kentwood, Michigan. He first attended Kelloggsville Christian School in Kentwood, then Grand Rapids Christian High School, from which he graduated in 1998 as class valedictorian. He then attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics with high honors. Amash then attended the University of Michigan Law School, graduating with a Juris Doctor in 2005.

After graduating from law school, Amash spent less than a year as a lawyer at the Grand Rapids law firm Varnum LLP. He then became a consultant to Michigan Industrial Tools Inc. (also known as Tekton Inc.), a company his father founded and owns. He worked for his family's business for a year before being elected to the Michigan House of Representatives in 2008. Amash's two brothers also have positions at Michigan Industrial Tools.

Amash and his wife Kara Day attended high school together and married after graduating from college. They have a son and two daughters.

Political career

Michigan House of Representatives

Glenn D. Steil Jr., the incumbent state representative for Michigan's 72nd House District, was unable to run for reelection in the 2008 election due to term limits. Amash ran in the Republican primary and defeated four other candidates before defeating Democratic nominee Albert Abbasse in the general election.

During his initial tenure in the State House, Amash sponsored five resolutions and twelve bills, but none of them passed. While in the State House, he began using his Twitter and Facebook pages to report his floor votes and explain his reasoning and had a government transparency page on his website that would allow people to view the members and salaries of his staff.

U.S. House of Representatives

Republican (2011-2019)

On February 9, 2010, Amash announced that he would run for the Republican nomination for Michigan's third congressional district and the next day incumbent Representative Vern Ehlers announced that he would not seek reelection. During the primary campaign he was endorsed by Betsy and Dick DeVos, the Club for Growth, Representative Ron Paul, and FreedomWorks PAC. In the Republican primary he defeated four other candidates and shortly before the general election he was named as one of ''Time'' magazine's "40 under 40 – Rising Stars of U.S. Politics". During the campaign he advocated politics supported by the Tea Party movement and defeated Democratic nominee Patrick Miles Jr. in the general election.

The House Republican Steering Committee removed Amash from the House Budget Committee on December 3, 2012, as part of a larger party leadership-caucus shift. He joined Representatives Tim Huelskamp and David Schweikert in a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner, demanding to know why they had lost their committee positions. A spokesperson for Republican Congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia said that Amash, Huelskamp, and Schweikert had been removed for "their inability to work with other members." ''Politico'' said that the three were "the first members pulled off committees as punishment for political or personality reasons in nearly two decades".

Following the retirement of Senator Carl Levin it was speculated that Amash would run in the 2014 Senate election and Senator Mike Lee encouraged him to run, but Amash chose to run for reelection to the House.

Amash was endorsed by the fiscally conservative Club for Growth PAC, which spent over $500,000 supporting Amash in his Republican primary against former East Grand Rapids School Trustee Brian Ellis, who was endorsed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and spent more than $1 million of his own money on the race.

After Amash defeated Ellis in the August primary, with 57% of the vote to Ellis's 43%, Amash was highly critical of Ellis and former Congressman Pete Hoekstra, who had backed Ellis. Of Hoekstra, Amash said, "You are a disgrace. And I'm glad we could hand you one more loss before you fade into total obscurity and irrelevance." Amash took exception to one of Ellis's television ads that quoted California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes calling Amash "Al Qaeda's best friend in Congress"; he demanded an apology from Ellis for running what he called a "disgusting, despicable smear campaign." As Conor Friedersdorf of ''The Atlantic'' notes, "Amash voted against the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, favored a measure to repeal indefinite detention, and opposed reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act." In the general election, Amash won reelection against Democratic nominee Bob Goodrich.

In 2011, Amash endorsed Representative Ron Paul's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2015, he endorsed Senator Rand Paul's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and later endorsed Senator Ted Cruz after Paul dropped out.

From 2011 to 2019, Amash missed only one of 5,374 roll call votes.

Independent (2019–2020)

In a July 4, 2019 op-ed, Amash announced that he was leaving the Republican Party and becoming an independent. In his op-ed, he said:

We are fast approaching the point where Congress exists as little more than a formality to legitimize outcomes dictated by the president, the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader...

Most Americans are not rigidly partisan and do not feel well represented by either of the two major parties. In fact, the parties have become more partisan in part because they are catering to fewer people, as Americans are rejecting party affiliation in record numbers.

No matter your circumstance, I’m asking you to join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us. If we continue to take America for granted, we will lose it.

On July 8, 2019, Amash formally submitted his resignation from the Party to Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Republican Conference Leader Liz Cheney. In the process, he resigned his seat on the Committee on Oversight and Reform. Amash thus became the only independent in the House of Representatives, and the first independent in the House since Bernie Sanders of Vermont (who left the House in 2007 after being elected to the Senate); and one of three independents in the United States Congress, along with Sanders and Senator Angus King of Maine.

Libertarian (2020–2021)

In April 2020, Amash joined the Libertarian Party. In doing so, Amash became the first Libertarian member to serve in either house of Congress.

In July 2020, Amash announced that he would not seek re-election to the House, saying that he would "miss" representing his constituency in Congress.

Political positions

Amash has described himself as a libertarian, dissenting from both Republican and Democratic leaderships more frequently than the vast majority of Republican members of Congress. Amash is regarded as one of the most libertarian members of Congress, receiving high scores from right-leaning interest groups such as the Club for Growth, Heritage Action for America, and Americans for Prosperity, and praise from limited-government think tanks and nonprofit organizations. He was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republicans in the House. In June 2019, Amash left the caucus. On July 4, 2019, he announced that he was leaving the Republican Party to become an independent. He officially announced his membership in the Libertarian Party in late April 2020.

Before leaving the GOP, Amash gained a reputation as a gadfly within the Republican Party; his staunchly libertarian and sometimes contrarian views resulted at times in disagreements with party leadership and other members of the Michigan congressional delegation. Amash is outspoken about the American two-party system. In a 2020 interview, he argued that national politicians now focused on media perception of their party, whereas "the actual process of legislating is all but forgotten."

Amash has called economists F. A. Hayek and Frédéric Bastiat his "biggest heroes" and political inspirations and has described himself as "Hayekian libertarian." When ''The New York Times'' asked him to explain his approach to voting on legislation, he replied, "I follow a set of principles. I follow the Constitution. And that's what I base my votes on. Limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty."

Domestic

Abortion

Amash opposes abortion and federal funding for abortion. He describes himself as "100 percent pro-life" and in 2017 voted in favor of federal legislation to ban most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Amash voted "present", rather than "yes" or "no", on the 2011 Full Year Continuing Appropriations Act, which provided for the cessation of federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Although he supports eliminating federal funding for Planned Parenthood, he abstained from defunding legislation, arguing that "legislation that names a specific private organization to defund (rather than all organizations that engage in a particular activity) is improper" and an "arguably unconstitutional" bill of attainder.

In May 2012, Amash was one of seven Republicans to vote against the Prenatal Non-Discrimination Act, which would have made it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion on a woman who wants to end a pregnancy based on the gender of the fetus. He criticized the bill as ineffective and virtually impossible to enforce, and said Congress "should not criminalize thought", while maintaining that he believes "all abortion should be illegal".

D.C. statehood

On June 26, 2020, Amash voted against H.R. 51, a D.C. Statehood bill.

Death penalty

In July 2019, he cosponsored Representative Ayanna Pressley's bill that would abolish the death penalty at the federal level.

On February 26, 2020, he was one of four representatives who voted against the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, which recognized lynching as a federal hate crime, stating that it would expand the use of the death penalty and that the acts criminalized by the bill are already illegal under federal law.

Drug policy and police reform

Amash has supported efforts to reform cannabis laws in Congress, including the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act in 2017 (which he cosponsored) and the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act in 2020. Both bills sought to legalize cannabis at the federal level by removing it from the Controlled Substances Act.

In 2015, Amash and Representative Ted Lieu (D–CA) introduced a bill to block the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from financing its Cannabis Eradication Program through civil asset forf