Former Sen. John Danforth, R-Mo., took to the op-ed pages to blast President Trump, early in his term, as “the most divisive president in our history.” While that assessment is a matter of opinion, Trump has managed to drive an unfamiliar wedge between the two most libertarian members of Congress.
Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., became the first member of his party to call for the president’s impeachment, saying Attorney General William Barr “deliberately misrepresented key aspects” of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia report, a document he further alleged many of his GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill never read.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., disagrees. “I think they took this great power we entrusted with them to spy on foreigners, and they directed it against Americans for partisan reasons,” Paul said of the Russia investigation in an interview with Fox News. “So, I think this has to be investigated, and I think it’s wrong for any Republican to think, ‘Oh gosh, this is a legitimate investigation.’ I think it’s a very partisan investigation.” Paul described the whole affair as “unlibertarian.”
It may be the most significant disagreement ever between these two lawmakers who both arrived in Washington after the tea party-wave election of 2010, their candidacies made possible by the GOP presidential campaigns of then-Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the Kentucky senator’s father, and have nearly identical voting records today. Aside from impeachment or the origins of the Russia investigation, it speaks also to differing strategies for Republicans in the age of Trump, whether libertarian, centrist, or conservative.
“Very carefully,” said former Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., when asked how Republicans could navigate those choppy waters. He should know. Sanford became an outspoken critic of Trump, received the president’s Twitter seal of disapproval, and then lost the GOP primary to a candidate Trump endorsed just hours before the polls closed. “Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA,” Trump tweeted.
Sanford said it was “surreal” to be on the receiving end of a presidential Twitter barrage, something his old House Freedom Caucus buddy Amash — the group has since condemned the Michigan lawmaker over his impeachment position — was now experiencing. Trump called Amash a “total lightweight” and a “loser.” But Amash is a heavy Twitter user in his own right. It was in defense of Sanford that Amash began getting particularly assertive with the president last year.
“He’s one of the most principled, consistent, and conservative members of Congress I’ve ever known,” Amash tweeted in response to Trump’s endorsement of Sanford’s primary challenger. “And unlike you, Mark has shown humility in his role and a desire to be a better man than he was the day before.” Republicans ended up losing Sanford’s seat in the midterm elections as Democrats captured the House.
“It appears to be a purely principled position,” Republican strategist Alex Conant said of Amash’s stance. “There’s certainly no political reason to do it. Most members of Congress live in constant fear of a primary challenge. I wouldn’t expect many Republican lawmakers to break with Trump on an issue as controversial as impeachment.”
“I honestly believe that Justin Amash read the report and is giving his authentic response,” said Cliff Maloney, head of the libertarian group Young Americans for Liberty. “In today’s polarized world, his response is seen as a political maneuver, but I don’t see it that way.”
Sanford noted there were three ways for Republicans with misgivings about Trump to deal with the president. “Compliance,” he said, citing fellow South Carolinian Sen. Lindsey Graham as an example. “Put your head down and hope the storm passes. Or speak your mind, but there are consequences. What Amash did is not for everyone.”
There is a fourth approach: Try to remain in Trump’s good graces and use his impulses to promote your policy preferences. Paul has regularly reminded Trump of his campaign rhetoric expressing skepticism of military intervention in the Middle East, emerging as a rare counterweight to the president’s generally hawkish foreign policy advisers on questions such as regime change in Iran. Paul has also tried to channel Trump’s outrage over campaign “spying” into efforts against warrantless surveillance more generally.
“What I’ve been promoting to the president is basically the idea that this is intelligence information that’s gathered with a lower standard than the Constitution [requires], that they shouldn’t look at this [National Security Agency] database for an American’s information unless you have a warrant,” Paul told Fox. “So for Gen. [Michael] Flynn, they should have gone to a court and asked for a warrant: ‘We want to listen to Gen. Flynn’s conversation.’ They didn’t do that.”
“I would say it seems to me that Rand making nice with Trump has yielded a few key policy victories for Rand,” said Liz Mair, a Republican strategist who was active in Never Trump politics in 2016. “Amash has not had the same success, and it’s ironic because his stance on domestic surveillance is one that if made law would be a hell of a lot more beneficial to Trump than that of a bunch of Trump allies — ahem, [Rep.] Devin Nunes [R-Calif.]. Though of course Amash and Rand have the same position.”
More Trump-friendly voices put it more starkly. “If you believe the investigation was entered into in good faith, I suspect you are either inclined to think the best of the feds and/or want to think the worst about or just plain get Trump,” opined the paleoconservative blogger Red Phillips. “That’s why this is not just a small deal that has only to do with how you feel about Trump. It has to do with how you fundamentally view the Fed Gov and how you handle the information it feeds you. This is why Amash’s play here is not just a legal difference over how you view obstruction. This is why it’s a very troublesome position for an alleged libertarian to take.”
Paul’s senior adviser Doug Stafford expressed similar sentiments in a Facebook post: “You don’t defend Liberty by pretending a corrupt, deep state-led operation that is exhibit A of why the government shouldn’t be allowed to run over your civil liberties is anything other than that.”
When Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments came up for renewal, Amash introduced amendments that would stop warrantless surveillance of Americans. The Trump White House, in agreement with both then-Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., threatened a veto. The Trump administration is also said to be considering a defense of keeping the power to access personal records under Section 215 even after the Wall Street Journal reported the NSA no longer wants this surveillance power. Amash and Paul have a bill that would end it.
“After falsely insisting to Congress that this illegal surveillance program is carefully overseen and critical to national security, the government admitted last year that it had to delete years of records due to legal violations, and now it’s been reported that the program has actually been shuttered for six months,” Amash said when the legislation was introduced in March. “The federal government’s appalling violations of our Fourth Amendment rights must end,” Paul said in the same statement.
Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale nevertheless tweeted that if Amash “were a TRUE libertarian, he wouldn’t stand for abuse of FBI power, spying, [and] bogus dossiers funded by political foes and fed to secret FISA courts. He is just another Grandstanding Swamp Creature auditioning for the approval of the liberal media.” The president Parscale is trying to get reelected has yet to extend his critique of surveillance to how the federal government interacts with Americans outside his orbit.
That’s part of why Amash sees little to cheer in the Trump administration. He believes the president has ushered in tariffs and economic nationalism without achieving his more libertarian-sounding aims. “Are we still droning people? Yeah,” Amash complained to the Washington Post last year. “Are we still running covert operations that weren’t authorized by Congress? Yeah. Is the government still spying on Americans without warrants? Without due process? Yeah. When some libertarians talk about the great accomplishments we’re seeing on foreign policy, I don’t know what they’re talking about. Reaching out to these guys is one thing, but you have to move down the court. He actually made it harder for us to have a good relationship with Russia.”
Federal spending and the budget deficit have also once again ballooned out of control despite two years of unified Republican control of Washington’s elected branches. It was a significant criticism tea party conservatives and their libertarian allies had of the George W. Bush years, as the feds splurged on both welfare and warfare. “The Trump era, this is Bush on steroids,” said Sanford.
The Freedom Caucus has become reliably pro-Trump, which is why they distanced themselves from Amash’s call for impeachment. Mick Mulvaney, a staunch fiscal conservative who belonged to the organization, now defends Trump’s bloated budgets as his acting White House chief of staff. Politico’s Tim Alberta identified Trump’s ascendance as the end of the “libertarian moment” — all the rage from 2013 to 2015 when Paul sometimes led in presidential polling among GOP primary voters — way back in 2017.
Still, in many cases Paul and Amash aren’t that far apart. While they split over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, as Amash opposed Kavanaugh over Fourth Amendment jurisprudence concerns, while Paul voted for his confirmation, these differences have only occasionally played out on substantive policy issues. They both opposed Barr for attorney general, even though he has ended up being much closer to Paul’s position on Trump-Russia than Amash’s. FiveThirtyEight assigns Paul the lowest “Trump score” of any Republican senator, as he votes with the president less often than Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah.
“I’m a fan of whatever tactics are necessary to advance liberty,” Maloney said. “Justin Amash has voted for less government spending than any other member of Congress since 2010. I’m more interested in votes that drain the swamp than rhetoric. And on that, Justin, Rand, and [Rep.] Thomas Massie [R-Ky.] are in a league of their own. Strategies might be different, but I’m impressed with their ability to stand firm in a land of legislators who keep voting for more government overreach and stripping our liberty away.”
But that doesn’t minimize how to accomplish that politically or grow the Paul-Amash-Massie ranks. “Justin is a good and honest man who does what he thinks is right. I don’t want to hear about your China theories or your theories about his next political move,” Stafford wrote. “But know this, this is how liberty actually dies — when good people set themselves on fire for no good reason and miss what’s really going on around them.”
Fundamentally, it is an argument over whether it’s a more significant risk to be discredited by opposition to Trump or association with him. There are many obvious reasons why Paul and Amash would disagree on this question. Paul has access to Trump; Amash does not. Born in 1980, Amash is closer in age to the millennials who often find Trump offensive. Paul is on the younger end of the baby boomers, who see Trump more congenially.
Paul represents Kentucky, a state Trump won easily and remains popular in. In fact, Trump ran ahead of Paul there in 2016, with 62.5% of the vote to the junior senator’s 57%. Amash ran ahead of Trump in his district, winning 59% to the future president’s 52%. The seat was once held by Gerald Ford, whom the Pauls would oppose as a sitting president at the Republican National Convention in 1976.
Amash’s libertarianism has probably allowed him to compile a more conservative voting record than his more moderate congressional district might otherwise be comfortable with. It is similarly possible that this will allow him to outlast his criticism of Trump. Paul already tried running as a Trump critic when they were both seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and it ended disastrously.
The ultimate disagreement between the two might not be about Trump but partisanship. Amash has increasingly taken to describing partisanship as a counterproductive, even destructive force, the factionalism the Founding Fathers warned against. Paul sees partisan sentiment as baked into the cake of American politics and best used in service of his principles where possible.
Which approach works best may have as much to do with how the Trump years end than who is right about this political dilemma.
W. James Antle III is the editor of the American Conservative.
