Rep. Justin Amash, an independent from Michigan, formed a presidential exploratory committee, and the tonal shift in the attitude toward the former Republican is palpable.
Former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld both challenged President Trump as Republicans, offering up primary challenges that went nowhere. Amash, on the other hand, will likely seek the nomination of the Libertarian Party.
The tonal shift is not a positive one.
The praise for Amash began in 2019 when he took a decidedly different tack surrounding the Mueller report, agreeing mostly with Democrats that Trump’s behavior met the threshold for impeachment, and his public sentiments came before the Ukraine allegations.
Here are my principal conclusions:
1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.
2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.
3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.
4. Few members of Congress have read the report.— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019
The Amash era of 2019 and early 2020 is one that found the harsh critics of the once-House Freedom Caucus member morph into unfiltered praise from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. At the same time, Trump supporters lashed out at Amash as a “traitor,” begging a Trump-friendly Republican to mount a primary campaign. Amash saved them the trouble by leaving the GOP and becoming an independent.
All that praise, however, dried up very fast once Amash announced his exploratory committee.
This would be a supreme act of patriotism by Rep. Amash. https://t.co/QevYInuUGA
— George Conway, Noble Committee Chair (@gtconway3d) May 21, 2019
In 2016, conservatives and Republicans who announced they would not vote for Trump (or Hillary Clinton, for that matter) took a mental beating from Trump supporters, framing the election as a “binary choice” and that a nonvote for Trump was a vote for Clinton. The irony, of course, is Clinton supporters said a nonvote for her was a vote for Trump.
The “binary choice” argument is a fallacy because it rests on the assumption that all voters do is choose between two preset alternatives. All one has to do is look at a sample presidential ballot, however, and see that’s not the case. There certainly is the strong likelihood of a binary outcome, but it’s incorrect to claim voters only have two choices.
Another claim from Biden-supporting Republicans is Amash’s entry into the race will pull votes from Biden and give them to Trump, particularly in the Midwest. That scenario, however, also rests on an assumption, namely, that people who signaled their support for Biden would shift their vote to Amash.
The real quagmire for people such as George Conway and others in the Lincoln Project (launched in part, ironically, to help reelect Amash to Congress as an independent) and like-minded people is, with Amash in the race as a Libertarian, it tosses a grenade into the entire “binary choice” scenario. What that did was not only give them cover to vote for Biden but also to advocate for his candidacy openly.
No word in the world of politics rolled off the tongues of more people over the last five years than “principles.” Anyone who threw their support behind Trump, people in Congress friendly to Trump, or Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination or defended Trump in any way had the finger pointed at them. “J’accuse! You’ve betrayed your principles!”
The possible candidacy of Amash creates quite the conundrum for those willing to claim an air of moral superiority over those who don’t think precisely as they do. The critics of Trump are correct about his fitness for office. Trump is not very smart, has no desire to learn, doesn’t understand how a republic functions, couldn’t care less about the separation of powers, and has no set ideology beyond what he thinks will make him look good at the moment.
The people who threw their support behind Biden will say he’s the polar opposite of Trump, knowing and understanding all that Trump does not.
But so does Amash.
That is where the principles argument suddenly disappears, and why? Outside of foreign policy, where Amash lines up more with the Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party as opposed to the Mitt Romney wing, Amash is representative of the very principles people have lamented were left behind by most to curry favor with Trump.
For the longest time, Biden represented the baseline of the Democratic Party. Yes, mostly on the Left, with streaks of independence on issues such as foreign policy and trade. But to help secure the Democratic nomination, Biden moved further to the left in an attempt to appeal to the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing.
It’s safe to say that Republicans admonishing others about principles will have a difficult case to make for themselves if they choose to abandon all of the praise they had for Amash, his policies, and his willingness to defy Trump by voting for Biden. That’s not advancing principles. It’s engaging in something transactional.
To mitigate the principles dilemma, the “Amash can’t win” argument moves up. It’s an extension of the “binary choice” fallacy and one that also does not pass the sniff test. A presidential race is not a horse race. We vote for the candidate who we think will best represent us.
Samuel Adams in the Boston Gazette on April 16, 1781, wrote: “Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual – or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society.”
That trust should not get relegated to choosing between two candidates, neither of which deserve a vote.
