He was the first Republican to back impeachment. Now, he's betting that there's room in conservative politics for anything other than Trump
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"You finally get to the point where nobody breaks from what the speaker wants or what the party leaders want," Amash tells me. "I've called it a partisan death spiral. There's no real way out because you'd have to convince the majority of Congress to break from the system that seems to work well for a lot of them." He doesn't see that happening any time soon. "For most of them, from their perspective, it's a good gig. They get to stay in power. They don't have to think. And they're taken care of."
All of this worsened under Trump. Amash's comrades in the House Freedom Caucus stopped caring so much about deficits and an open legislative process — now, it was all about delivering for the president. "I used to feel like I had more people who were willing to stand up for the right thing," Amash says. "In recent years and especially in recent months, people have capitulated and allowed the system to consume them."
The Justice Department released the Mueller Report on April 18th, Amash's 39th birthday. He told himself that, unlike his Republican colleagues, he wouldn't weigh in until he had read the report, front to back, all 448 pages of it. The Russian interference findings in Volume I unsettled him, but it was the evidence of obstruction of justice laid out in the second volume that floored him.
A month after the report came out, Amash wrote a tweet. He took aim at Attorney General Bill Barr for having "deliberately misrepresented Mueller's report." He stated that Trump had "engaged in impeachable conduct" as laid out in the Mueller report. And he blasted his colleagues in Congress for not bothering to read the report in the first place. He took a deep breath and hit send.
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It's a "totally corrupt" system, he told one audience. "You either fall in line and the party apparatus supports you. Or if you have independent thoughts, you are punished, criticized, and attacked even by your own party."
After he tweeted in support of impeachment, Trump called him a "lightweight" and a "loser." The Republican National Committee accused him of failing the people he represented. As of this writing, there are five Republicans (and four Democrats) vying to knock Amash out of office, including the scion of one of Michigan's wealthiest families. One accused him of teaming up with "radical liberals … to try and bring down our president." One of his biggest donors, the Christian conservative DeVos family, disavowed him. Some of his closest friends chastised him for going public with his support for impeachment. Why couldn't he have kept those thoughts to himself?
Amash says he wasn't happy to have found what he did in the Mueller report. "Nobody wants to find that the president has engaged in impeachable conduct," he tells me. "But I had an obligation to constituents to tell them. It was an attempt to write something that would be correct for history." He says he's still friends with lawmakers like Thomas Massie and Jim Jordan, but neither Massie nor Jordan would agree to speak about Amash for this story.
His central message, however, is not about the poisonous partisanship in Washington. It's about putting his faith in the very people who came out to his town halls and chimed in on his (still active) Facebook page and Twitter. The typical voter, he says, isn't as partisan as the politicians and consultants in Washington think. Amash believes he has more support in his district, not less, since he turned independent. That was true at the handful of events I attended, where the number of people who thanked him for what he'd done outnumbered the ones who criticized him for "betraying" the president.
"That is not the narrative they expected," he told one crowd. "That means we are going to surprise them with this. It will help change the mindset in Washington, and I think that is critically important."
