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Demographics and Elections Commentary tagged with Justin Amash

1/18/2024: [Michigan] Former GOP Congressman Justin Amash explores joining crowded Michigan Senate field [Fox News]


Photo credit: Getty

Amash started off in Congress well enough, building conservative credentials with his voting record and enhancing that "cred" by being kicked off of GOP committees in 2012 along with Kansas representative Tim Huelskamp and David Schweikert of Arizona. All three were ousted for being too far to the right to suit many of their more-powerful Republican colleagues, including milquetoast John Boehner who was Speaker at the time.

Schweikert is still in Congress -- at least for the rest of this year. He represents a very marginal and deteriorating district in the Phoenix suburbs, barely won in 2022, and Democrats are spending big to defeat him in November. They have a significant probability of doing exactly that.

Huelskamp proved to be such an irritant to the Republican leadership (he once attempted to unseat Crybaby Boehner from the speakership and replace him with Jim Jordan) that he was successfully targeted -- by Boehner and other members of his own party -- for elimination in the 2016 primary. Roger Marshall, who defeated Huelskamp in that western Kansas primary to the delight of the GOPe, has gone on to parlay his squishiness into a Senate career.

Wikipedia notes with approval that "Amash received national attention when he became the first Republican congressman to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump, a position he maintained after leaving the party". Amash abandoned the Republicans in 2019 to become a so-called independent, then flitted over to the Libertarian party before leaving Congress. Now he wants to be welcomed back into the GOP as their standard-bearer in a losing Senate election.

Amash is a gadfly who doesn't know what the hell he is or what he wants to be. Well, he knows he wants to be a senator all of a sudden but he isn't going to get that prize. And he knows he hates Israel, which really isn't sufficient to base a Senate campaign on although it might get him votes in Dearborn-istan.

He's just a charlatan who misses the attention and the payday he got when he was a self-important congressman -- especially the media adulation he received after he made clear how much of a "maverick" he is and how he hated President Trump enough to leave Trump's party and even to leave Congress. So now he's a darling of the media and others on the left, claiming to be a "principled conservative" though he is actually neither of those things.


It's true that the current GOP field for Senate in Michigan (defeated ex-Congressmen Peter Meijer and Mike Rogers and a bunch of other hopeless losers) is woeful -- aside from police chief James Craig, who we trust is not as clueless as he was in 2022 when he naively allowed Democrat operatives in disguise to deliberately gather invalid signatures for him, and was thus disqualified. After the primary Craig would be at least a 5-point underdog no matter what some recent polls have suggested. Nonetheless he remains the best option for this unlikely but still possible Senate pickup.

Amash sees a small opening and wants to capitalize.

He can get back that media adulation by torpedoing Craig and sabotaging efforts to erase the Democrat majority in the Senate. Craig may not be so easy to torpedo in the primary, what with Meijer (liberal) and Rogers (moderate) splitting the non-conservative vote. Amash is probably more likely to jump into this race as an independent than a Republican, though it would be interesting to watch GOP primary debates with Amash challenging Meijer about which of the two of them hates Donald Trump more.

Given the dangerous (as far as Amash is concerned) prospect of "President Trump" becoming a reality in 2025, an Amash campaign would attempt to stymie the possibility of Trump having a GOP-controlled Senate to work with should he somehow win, substituting instead a Rat-controlled Senate which would revive Trump's persecution where it left off. Some believe that the mass exodus of GOP incumbents from the House is being orchestrated for a similar purpose -- handing control to the opposition, just in case.

We'd much rather take our chances with Craig than Amash or any of the other pissants in the general election. The former Detroit police chief might be able to eke out a vote or two in the Detroit ghetto precincts, get within the margin of vote fraud statewide, and at least make the Rats sweat a little before their probable late-election-night-vote-dump victory here in November.

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Michigan 2024 Senate James Craig Yes Justin Amash No