Justin Amash after leaving the GOP last Independence Day sidestepped challenging Trump and focused on retaining his House seat as an independent. It was always going to be a tough fight, although Amash put his best face forward on his comparative fundraising and internal polls showing him "competitive". I suspect, though, Trump's impeachment was unpopular in his GOP-leaning district, and Justin's support for impeachment probably doomed his candidacy in a 3-way race. The Dems in his district didn't like his stands on most issues. Republicans probably didn't want to lose the seat to a Dem plurality. (This discussion is speculative on my part.) Amash would have retained my theoretical support, but I'm not a typical voter.
So supposedly, without any public notice, Amash suspended his reelection campaign in early February.
In the interim (since Amash went independent), I was listening to a Tom Woods podcast with Scott Horton when they started promoting the POTUS LP candidacy of Jacob Hornberger. The name immediately intrigued me because I knew a Charles Hornberger, the point guard on my district-unbeaten (all 3 years of south Texas high school) basketball team and the star of our debate team. It became more intriguing when Jacob spoke of growing up on a Laredo area ranch. (Jacob doesn't really talk about any siblings, but I found a clipping that suggests Charles is his younger brother.) Now familiarity doesn't mean squat in my own political universe, but we both started out as Texas Democrats and eventually migrated to libertarianism,
I found Jacob's Youtube channel and his libertarian organization URL (Future of Freedom Foundation) and loved his stands on abortion and immigration, quite compatible with mine. My regular blog readers have seen numerous embedded videos in my daily blog posts over the last few weeks.
So over the last couple of weeks we've seen Justin Amash emerge from the shadows to announce his candidacy for the LP nomination. It caught me off-guard, and I'm not happy with the development.
Is the news all bad? No. For example, Amash appeared on this week's CNN Sunday talk soup, To state the well-known idiom, "there is no such thing as bad publicity." Amash has focused national attention on the nomination that Hornberger and others haven't, not through any fault of their own. Amash has also switched his party affiliation to Libertarian, instantly becoming the highest profile Libertarian in public office.
But as Jacob has pointed out, that is a double-edged sword. For example, Jacob has worked on putting issues first. If Amash is nominated, the Trump-Amash clash over impeachment is going to be a high distraction. Now I have issues with Trump's behavior in office (over and beyond his policies), including what happened with Ukraine. Generally speaking, I'm probably, along with Amash, in the minority position in supporting impeachment. I'm not going into an exhaustive taxonomy of opinions here (which may vary by libertarian), but to summarize some of the opinions:
- Jacob Hornberger (see the clip below) has a fairly conventional libertarian stance that foreign aid is unconscionable in concept, an implicit form of bribery for American policy influence. (I actually agree with that in concept.) So (I don't think he says this directly), if Trump did suspend Ukraine aid, that is to the benefit of American taxpayers, and he really doesn't care about the details or Trump's rationale.
- Rand Paul was obsessed with the anonymous whistleblower of the Zelensky phone call violating Trump's fundamental rights to face his accuser.
- In a separate twist, Ron Paul suggested that it was an attempted CIA coup, i.e., the Deep State
- Richard Epstein argued that the US had a legitimate right to investigate whether the Bidens had personally/corruptly profited from US intervention in Ukraine, especially given Biden's high profile involvement. He also argued that Zelensky had opened the door on US cooperation with Ukraine's corruption investigations.
- As Brion McClanahan has said, if Trump was impeached for violating the Constitution, so should have been his predecessors, so the impeachment power was arbitrarily enforced.
Will the impeachment be an issue this fall? I hope not. I think for Trump it will continue to be as his impeachment will be forever associated with how history remembers him. Just over the weekend, Trump bashed Bush 43 for not defending him over impeachment. Trump basically thinks Amash's candidacy helps his campaign by drawing support which would otherwise go to Biden; he considers Amash to be a loser who is running for POTUS because he can't get reelected to the House. But let's face it: from a national media perspective, that's going to be a focus, not libertarian policies.
I recently wrote a brief exchange on Facebook with another libertarian I clipped in my recent social media post. I pointed out Hornberger was my preferred candidate. And he responded with basically the point, wouldn't Amash make a bigger impact? Probably; Amash is well-known in DC, has honed a reputation for explaining his votes on Facebook and at 40 years old is at least 3 decades younger than his competitors (including Jacob). Amash is highly articulate and knowledgeable; he's probably a better public speaker than Jacob.
But I still have reservations about some of Amash's position, a big one being his promotion of the COVID-19 dole. Although some left-libertarians accept the concept of universal basic income, there are the usual arguments against transferism (moral hazard and the like); see here for Caplan's arguments against UBI. I haven't seen Amash's defense, but presumably it's something like Charles Murray's argument as an alternative to the welfare state. Hornberger discusses this in the #7 interloper series episode I embedded in a weekend post.
Thus, I see Hornberger as a more philosophically consistent libertarian and my preferred candidate vs the interloper Amash who entered the primary a month before nomination, which I consider unfair: he didn't go through the debates, etc. But I will likely endorse the convention's nominee this month.
