Matt Welch has this comprehensive article in Reason Magazine, setting forth what is known about Justin Amash’s plans to seek the presidency. Thanks to Eric Garris for the link.
Matt Welch has this comprehensive article in Reason Magazine, setting forth what is known about Justin Amash’s plans to seek the presidency. Thanks to Eric Garris for the link.
I’ve often said that Amash’s best path forward is to try to get re-elected to congress. I thought things were too wierd and too charged for him to get any traction, and it would be better for him to defer any presidential run for 2024.
Given the vitriol I’ve heard over the last 24 hours over the prospect of him running, you’d have thought the election already occurred and Biden lost.
Given that, I’m reconsidering. The pushback means that Amash detractors want the public to ignore the Libertarian option, and Amash will be a very visible candidate if he runs, and gets the LP nomination.
If the Libertarian Party is to have any effect, its candidates must be immune to any impact that they may have on the outcome. Otherwise they are playing the big party game.
Has there been polling in his congressional district? I suspect he knows his re-election chances are not good. Otherwise, why wait so long?
Maybe he could boost his polling if he ran for Congress and President simultaneously.
Amash might get X pct of Donkeys and Y pct of Elephants — TOTAL Z PCT OF ALL VOTES.
solve for X / Y / Z.
Which LARGE gang will give him $$$ Trillions to — DIVIDE AND CONQUER the other LARGE gang ???
—
PR
APPV
TOTSOP
HOW MUCH CHAOS ABOUT THE HOLDING OF THE LP NATIONAL CONVENTION ???
Demo rep: not clear whether it would help democrats or republicans more. So, I would not expect any big checks from either one. Only angry accusations from both that he is helping the other one.
Why so many postings for a guy who isn’t even officially running yet? Is this Richard’s choice now that Chafee has imploded?
Because he’s a bigger news story. He promoted himself to being a bigger name by being the only Republican congressman to break with the Trumpetry cult on impeachment and by leaving that party. He’s an instant frontrunner if he jumps into the L.P. and that’s not because I support him for it, which I don’t. Independent may not be technically impossible at this point, but I would think practically it is, unless maybe he has a billionaire VP running mate. Or probably even then.
Justin Amash is a much better candidate than Lincoln Chafee.
At least Chafee actually joined the party and went though the motions of running. Amash just wants to declare and be handed the nomination. The Libertarian Party uses an anti-democratic process to select its nominee with primaries meaning nothing. This allows outsiders like Amash to take the nomination and use it for their own purposes. Amash is nothing more than a Never Trumper who bases his views on his severe TDS. Do you want the LP to be the party of people who oppose Trump based on that rather than a coherent libertarian message? If the party nominates Amash, it’s a slap in the face to all the party activists and all the party activists who’ve spent time running for the nomination. What’s the point of even having Libertarian debates or straw polls or primaries if the party is just going to pick the first shiny badge who shows up?
*The second “all the party activists” should just be “candidates.”
Amash may be better at politics than Chafee, but Chafee was less bad in the sense that he had also run as a democrat, as well as been elected as an independent. Amash’s opposition to trump is refreshing and completely accurate. It’s the one thing that would make me warm up to nominate him. But overall he’s still too much of a right / conservative / republican for me even if not a trumpetry cultist.
I think I’ll stick with my assessment that this year it’s best to go with a party activist and radical campaign even if it means a lot less votes. 3 crossovers in a row is more than enough.
A vermin style campaign would also be interesting to try but I don’t think we can get enough of the campaign’s supporters plugged in as delegates, or open enough traditional delegates up to the upside potential.
I am not supporting Justin Amash for the nomination. I was just pointing out that he’s got a better record as an elected official than Lincoln Chafee. He’s also got a better record than Bill Weld, Gary Johnson, and Bob Barr.
Having said this, I don’t like the fact that he parroted Democrat talking points during the Trump impeachment farce. He should have used it as an opportunity to point out the legitimate reasons for impeaching Donald Trump, such as him signing an Executive Order banning bump stocks, or for ordering an attack on Syria without a Declaration of War, etc…
I have to give credit to Jacob Hornberger and Jo Jorgensen for acknowledging that the charge the Democrats tried to impeach Trump for was nonsense, although they both would support impeaching him on legitimate charges. I do agree with Adam Kokesh that the entire federal government deserves to be impeached, but that’s a separate issue.
The Democrats would not go after Trump for any legitimate constitutional charges, because they are all guilty of the same things, or worse in some cases.
Where was Justin Amash on the recent bailout? I know that Representative Thomas Massie, and Senator Rand Paul, both voiced opposition to it. Did Justin Amash say or do anything to try to stop it?
If Justin Amash wanted to run for President as a Libertarian, why did he become an independent after leaving the Republican Party, instead of joining the Libertarian Party? If Amash had joined the Libertarian Party, this would have given the LP its first sitting member of Congress who did not get elected under another party’s banner (Ron Paul technically held a Lifetime membership in the LP when he got re-elected to Congress as a Republican, and he still holds that Lifetime membership to this day, but his entire tenure in Congress was officially as a Republican). This would have been big news, and generated a lot of publicity for the LP. If Amash comes into the LP now, it will probably be after all of the state conventions happened, and he won’t have much time to familiaze himself with party members. If he was really serious about running as a Libertarian, he should have joined the LP, and started attending state LP conventions for the last several months.
Another bad thing about Amash is that since he’d be coming from the Republican Party, and he became the LP’s VP nominee, this would be the 4th election in a row where the LP has people heavily identified with the Republican Party on its presidential ticket. This makes the Libertarian Party look like the home for washed up Republicans (Jim Gray has that same problem, as he is a former Republican Family Court Judge out of California). I am not necessarily opposed to the LP running a former Republican, or even a former Democrat (if you can find one that actually qualifies as a legitimate libertarian), so long as they have a libertarian track record, however, if this is all that the party does is put people who used to be in one of the major parties at the top of its ticket, it creates a bad branding issue. The Libertarian Party ought to focus more on making its own people into stars rather than relying on stars from the major parties.
Justin Amash is not my first choice for the 2020 nomination, but given that he’s got a better record as an elected official than Lincoln Chafee, Bill Weld, Gary Johnson, and Bob Barr, I’d be more open to him than I was to them.
“Amash may be better at politics than Chafee, but Chafee was less bad in the sense that he had also run as a democrat, as well as been elected as an independent.”
Issues and track record are more important than labels, and on issues and track record, Amash is a much better candidate than Lincoln Chafee.
I looked into both of their records. Chafee kept waving around that he voted against the war in Iraq (which was not officially a war, because Congress never passed a Declaration of War, but that’s another issue) as a Republican Senator. This was a good thing, however, it should be pointed out that Chafee did vote for the Patriot Act, and he in fact defended that vote years later while he was running in the Democratic primaries. He also voted in favor of continuing to fund the war in Iraq. His record was mostly bad from a libertarian perspective. He had an F rating on gun rights from the National Rifle Association, and given that the NRA has a more lenient ratings system than does Gun Owners of America, one has got to be pretty bad to get an F vote from the NRA. Chafee also supported Obamacare, and he supported a bunch of big government programs. His record was not 100% bad, but it was bad enough to the point where I’d say he was not really in the Libertarian Quadrant of the Nolan Chart.
Amash’s record is pretty good, certainly much better than Chafee’s from a libertarian perspective.