 Just 15% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions I asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who's currently exploring a Senate right. Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely principal voice for limiting the size, scope and spending of the federal government. After voting to impeach Donald Trump in 2019, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent and joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only libertarian to ever serve in Congress. We talked about the 2024 presidential race and the country's political and cultural polarization that seems to be growing with every passing day. We also talked about how his parents' experiences as a Christian refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship and American exceptionalism. This Q&A took place on the final day of Liberty Con, the annual event for Students for Liberty that was held recently in Washington, D.C. Here is the reason interview with Justin Amash. Thank you everybody for coming out and even coming out for Justin Amash. Let's give it up to him one more time, please. So the topic of this talk, and we're going to veer away from that, but let's start with why is Congress broken and how do we fix that? Let's give you a couple of minutes on that. We could take up the whole 30 minutes talking about that if we wanted to. We don't know exactly how Congress got to where it is, but today it is highly centralized where a few people at the top control everything. And that has a lot of negative consequences for our country. Among them is that the President has an unbelievable amount of power because the President now only has to negotiate with really a few people. You have to negotiate with the Speaker of the House, you have to negotiate with the Senate Majority Leader and maybe some of the Minority Leaders. But it's really a small subset of people that you have to negotiate with. And when that happens, it gives the President so much leverage. So when we talk about things like going to war without authorization, well, as long as the Speaker of the House isn't going to hold the President accountable and the Senate Majority Leader is not going to, the President is just going to do what he wants to do. And when it comes to spending, as long as the President only has to negotiate with a couple of people, the President is going to do whatever the President wants to do. So it's super easy in the system for the President to essentially bully Congress and dictate the outcomes. But there's a deeper problem with all of this, which is representative government is supposed to be a discovery process. You elect people to represent you, you send them to Washington, and then the outcomes are supposed to be discovered by these representatives through discussions and debates and the introduction of legislation and amendments. And you're supposed to have lots of votes where you freely, you know, where the votes freely reflect your will representing the people back home. But instead, in Congress today, a few leaders are deciding what the final product is and then they're even not bringing it to the floor until they know they have the votes. So there's no actual discovery process. And Nancy Pelosi used to brag about this, like she wouldn't bring a bill to the floor unless she knew it was going to pass, which is the opposite of how Congress should work. So what are, briefly, what are some of the ways to kind of decentralize power within Congress? You know, when you were in Congress, you founded the Freedom Caucus, which was supposed to be kind of a redoubt of people who believed in, you know, limited government and libertarian and conservative principles, and actually even some liberal principles, but decentralizing authority, you got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, right? Well, I resigned from it. Well, you were asked to leave, right? It was like the police sirens were coming in. It's like, you know what? I'm going to go, right? But even places like that that were explicitly designed to act as a countervailing force to this unified Congress. So how can that happen? What can you do, or what can somebody do to make that happen? Well, it does take people with strong will. I think that when we go to vote for our elected officials, when you go to vote for a representative, when you go to vote for a senator, you have to know that that person is willing to stand up to the leadership team. And if that person's not willing to break from the leadership team on a consistent basis, and this doesn't mean they have to, you know, be mean or anything like that. Although that's nice. That's an option, right? That's an option. But they just have to be independent enough where you know they're willing to break from their leadership team. And if they're not willing to do that, it doesn't matter how much they agree with you on the issues, don't vote for them. Because that person's going to sell out. There's no chance they're going to stand up for you when it counts. So I think you need to have people who have a strong will, who are going to go there and actually represent you and are willing to stand up to the leaders. If you are interested in Amash's commentary on contemporary issues, go to his sub-stack. It's Justin Amash. And the tagline is a former congressman spills on Congress and makes the practical case for the principles of liberty. So it's on sub-stack. It's a great read. And particularly on issues you mentioned, kind of war and things like that and the war powers resolution, it's great stuff. But can you tell us quickly how did you discover libertarian ideas? And then you got elected in 2010 which was a wave election. It was part of the Tea Party reaction to eight years of Bush and more problems during the financial crisis and the reaction of government to that. Where did you first encounter the ideas of liberty and how did that motivate you to get into Congress? Well, the ideas of liberty are something that have been with me since I was a child. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from. I think they came from my parents' immigrant experience coming to the United States. My dad came here as a refugee and... A refugee from? From Palestine. So he was born in Palestine in 1940 and when the state of Israel was created in it was a refugee. So my mom is a Syrian immigrant. So when my parents came here they weren't wealthy. My dad was a very poor refugee. He was so poor that the Palestinians made fun of him. So that's really poor. And when he came here he didn't have much but he felt he had opportunity. He had a chance to start a new life. A chance to make it even though he came from a different background from a lot of people. Even though his English wasn't great compared to a lot of people. So he came here and he worked hard and he built a business and when we were young he used to tell us that America is the greatest place on earth where someone can come here like he did and start a new life and have the chance to be successful. And it doesn't matter what your background is it doesn't matter what obstacles you face you have a chance here and you don't have that chance in so many places around the world. So for me I think that's where that spirit of liberty came from. It was from my dad's experience especially my mom as well coming here as a young immigrant. And so I was always a little bit I guess anti-authoritarian as a child. I rebelled against teachers at times. I didn't like arbitrary authority let's put it that way. When someone just would make up a rule like this is the rule I just say so tell me why. Have you rethought that as a parent? No I mean I let my kids think very freely and as long as they follow the rules. I don't I don't mind when they are a little bit rebellious. I think it doesn't hurt for kids to have some independence. I encourage them to challenge their teachers even when they think the teacher's wrong about something. I think that it's a good thing for people to go out there and not just accept everything as it is. That kind of independence. You have famously as a congressman explained all of your votes on Facebook which is a rare concession by authority to say this is why I did what I did. And actually a lot of the people in leadership and in congress didn't like that I was doing that because I was giving people at home the power to challenge them. Instead of just being told now I was revealing what was going on. You grew up in Michigan. You went to University of Michigan as an undergrad for law school. Was it there that you started coming across names like Hayek and Mises and Friedman, Rand Rothbard or whoever? Not really, no. My background is in economics. My degree is in economics. And thank you. People love economics out there. Has anybody here ever been part of economics? Alright. Anyone from economics here? Well speaks slower. So and I did well in economics at Michigan but we sure didn't study Austrian economics. We didn't study Hayek. I think he might have been mentioned in one class. Very briefly he was mentioned. There was like one day where he was mentioned. But I'd say that what happened is as I went through my economics degree and then I got a law degree at Michigan as well I started to realize that I had a lot of differences from other people who were otherwise aligned with me. I was a Republican. I was aligned with them on a lot of things but there were a number of issues where we didn't align. Some of the foreign policy issues but certainly a lot of civil liberties issues and I started to wonder what am I? What's going on here? I just thought of myself as a Republican and I would read the platform and hear what they're saying. They believe in limited government and economic freedom and individual liberty but when push came to shove on a lot of issues they didn't believe those things. They'd say they believed those things but they didn't. So I've told this story before I just typed some of my views into a Google search and up popped Hayek's Wikipedia page. So literally it was like the top thing on Google. So I clicked on that and started reading about them and I was already in my mid-20s at this time. And I was like this is what I believe. And do you think that full view of individual liberty not just in the economic sphere but in everything else that's informed by your parents experience and also they're running a business but it is interesting because you would have been coming of age during a time when the Republicans were ascendant but they were kind of the war party and we were told after 9-11 that you should not speak freely. That was kind of a problem. Yeah, sure. And throughout my life I've believed freedom of speech freedom of thought, freedom of expression these are critical values. Maybe they're the essence of everything that makes this country work. You know the idea that we come from a lot of places there's an incredible amount of diversity in the United States. I think diversity is always treated or often treated like a bad word these days. But it's a blessing to our country that we have people who come from so many backgrounds and actually the principle of liberty is about utilizing that diversity. You know it's in centrally planned systems where diversity is not utilized where someone at the top dictates to everyone else and doesn't take advantage of any of the diversity. They say, no a few of us at the top, we know everything it doesn't matter all of your backgrounds all of your skills, all of your talents that doesn't matter. What matters is we've got a few people in a room somewhere and they're going to decide everything and they know best because they're experts. So you came into office in 2011 and it seemed like there was a real libertarian insurgency within the Republican party but more nationally and of course people were tired of continued centralization government secrecy famously a lot of Bush's activities and particularly war spending early on was done in supplemental and emergency preparations not really open to full discussion and what not all of this stuff coming out of the Patriot Act somebody like I was going to say Darth Vader I meant Dick Cheney kind of saying we were in control but then Obama also promised the most transparent administration ever and plainly did not deliver on that. But that energy pushing back on centralization and government power and government secrecy seems to you know that helped bring you and other people like you to Congress seems to have dissipated do you agree with that and if so what took that away? Yeah I agree with that when I was running for office both for State House in 2009 when I was running for that office and when I got to Congress in 2011 there was a lot of energy behind a sort of a limited government libertarianish republicanism and I felt like libertarianism was really rising there was a chance for libertarian ideals to get a lot of traction and a lot of people who used to be I guess more like bush conservatives were coming around to the libertarian way. So I felt really good about where things were heading and for the first I'd say three or four years that I was in Congress I felt like we continued to move in the right direction I mean the creation of the Freedom Caucus was kind of a dream of bringing people together to challenge the leadership. They weren't all libertarians or anything like that I mean there were a few who were libertarian leaning but the idea that a group of Republican members it wasn't determined that it was going to be only Republicans but it ended up being Republicans who got together and said hey we're going to challenge the status quo we're going to challenge the establishment that was a kind of a dream that it had come together and then when Donald Trump came on the scene I think a lot of that just fell apart because he's such a strong personality and character and had so much of hold over a lot of the public especially on the Republican side that it was very hard for my colleagues to be willing to challenge him What do you think the essence there's been a lot of discussion this weekend about the threat of things like national conservatism or Trump's populism on the right woke progressivism on the left maybe we'll get to that in a second but what's the essential appeal of Trump is it his actual, is it his personality is that he said he could win and he ended up doing that at least once is it a cult of personality is it the idea he's in charge what's the core of his his appeal to you? I think he's definitely a unique character he has a certain charisma that is probably unmatched in politics I mean I don't think I've ever seen someone who campaigns as effectively as he does it doesn't mean you have to agree with all of the ethics of what he does or any of that or the substance but I think that... to keep it in Michigan he's a rockser he's an Iggy Pop you may not like what he's doing on the stage but you can't take your eyes off it that's right he holds court when he's out there people pay attention and he really understands the essence of campaigning and how to effectively go after opponents now again I'm not saying that all of these things are necessarily ethical or that other people should do the same things but he really understands how to lead a populist movement and how important do you think in his appeal is a politics of resentment that somehow he is going to get back what was taken from you the whole Make America Great again there's a whole idea there of someone is destroying your life and I'm going to get it back for you and that's a very powerful thing to a lot of people for a lot of people out there it is more important to get back at others than necessarily to have some kind of vision of how this is all going to work going forward it's not appealing to me because I understand we live in one country we have people of all sorts of backgrounds and if you're going to persuade people you have to be able to live with them and work with them regardless of your differences it doesn't mean that you can't be upset be angry about what some other people are doing or saying but there has to be an effort to live together here as one country we have too much in common in this country what Michigan was a massive swing state when he won election you voted to impeach Donald Trump what went into that calculation and what was the reaction like to that because that's a profiling courage well I don't think that's like you know I don't think that's my most courageous vote not even by a long shot naming the post office after your father or I didn't name any post offices after my father to be clear so I think that the courageous votes are the ones where everyone is against you and I don't mean just like you know one party it's one thing to vote for impeachment and like half the country loves what you did and half the country doesn't like what you did that's in my mind not that challenging or difficult it's when you take a vote and you know that 99% of the public is going to misconstrue this misunderstand it be against it the vote is going to be something like you know 433 to 1 in the house or something like that those are the tough votes and there are plenty of those votes out there where you're taking a principled stand and you're doing it to protect people's rights but it's not the typical narrative is there an example in your legislative record that you would put forth for that well I mean one of the ones I've talked about before is they tried to pass some anti-lynching legislation at the federal level and we're everyone's against lynching obviously but the legislation itself was bad and would actually harm a lot of people including harming a lot of black Americans so like there was this idea that this legislation was good was just parodied by a lot of people in the media they didn't read the legislation and in fact I complained about it and it mysteriously did not pass both houses that congress after I pointed out all the problems with it it did pass the House of Representatives did not pass both houses and get signed by the president and mysteriously the next congress they reintroduced it and rewrote it in a way that took into consideration all of my complaints and they tried to pass it off like they were just reintroducing the same legislation and I pointed out hey they actually you know they actually saw that there was a problem here and then tried to pretend like oh you know those kind of votes are tough because when you take the vote everyone thinks you're wrong everyone and you have to go home and you have to explain it and those are the ones that are tricky back to the impeachment point look I'd impeach every president let's be let's be clear now I'm not the kind of person who's going to impeach the legislation you know over every thing that a president does wrong when you introduce legislation to impeach a president you have to have some backing for it it can't just be you know one person saying let's impeach for example I would definitely impeach President Biden over these unconstitutional wars 100% but the idea of impeaching impeachment legislation suggests there's other people who will join you otherwise it's just an exercise in futility you know you introduce it it doesn't go anywhere it just sits there we're going to impeach people there has to be some public backing which is why I try to make the case all the time for these impeachable offenses why some legislation should be brought forth to you on that kind of stuff but yeah I think that every president should be impeached every recent president at least if Trump populism national conservatism and a politics of resentment is sucking up a lot of energy on the right how do you feel about or like how do we deal with the rise of identity politics and a kind of woke progressivism on the left where is that coming from and what is the best way to combat that I think a lot of it is just repackaged socialist ideas collectivist ideas the idea of equity for example is really like a perversion of the idea of equality in most respects when people say equity they mean the opposite of equality it means you're going to have the government or some central authority decide what the outcome should be how much each person should have rather than some system of equality before the law where the government is not some kind of arbiter of who deserves what and when you think about it there is no way for the government to do this there's no way for the government to properly assess all of our lives this is in many ways the point of diversity is like we all so different and there's no way that a central authority can decide how to manage all that so for many of the people on the woke left who say they care about diversity they don't care about diversity if they're talking about equity these things are in conflict with each other the idea that you're going to decide that someone is more deserving than another based on some superficial characteristics as an example I've talked about this and I've talked about this earlier in this conversation my dad came here with nothing as a poor refugee yet in a lot of cases he might be classified as just a white American even though he came here as an extremely poor Palestinian refugee New York Times for example, classifies me as white they might classify someone else who's Middle Eastern as a person of color so I think a lot of this is just someone is making decisions at the top saying well we think this person is more like this or that and we're going to decide they're more deserving but they don't know our backgrounds they don't know anything about us they don't know who deserves this or who deserves that and no central authority could figure that out so the best thing we can do is have a system of equality before the law where the law treats everyone the same it doesn't give an advantage to any person over another person and it may not be fair in some sense to some people some people may say well that's not fair you know instead of having a dad who's a Palestinian refugee their dad was a Silicon Valley billionaire some person might have a dad who was a professor another person might have a dad who worked at a fast food restaurant you don't know what the differences are the government can't figure all of this out and say who is more deserving than someone else so I really think that the the woke left when they push this idea of equity they're really pushing against diversity they're saying we're gonna decide a few people at the top are gonna decide who's valuable and who's not valuable and they're not gonna actually take into consideration any of our differences because no central authority could take it into consideration you are a libertarian not an anarchist you believe there is a role for government but it should be obviously much more limited you're also I could write a whole book about that we would love to read that book you are also an Orthodox Christian could you talk a little bit about how in a world of limited government a libertarian world government wouldn't be doing everything for everybody but organizations and institutions like the church or other types of intervening countervailing mediating institutions would help to fill the gaps that are left by government yeah I mean for sure that's the place for these organizations is to help in society not to have government deciding it again when you have some central authority deciding it you are really limiting the opportunities for the public you're limiting the opportunities for assisting people you're deciding that a few people are going to make all the decisions rather than having a lot of organizations and a lot of individuals making decisions when you centralize it all there are a lot of people who are going to be missed a lot of people who are going to be ignored when you let the marketplace work this out when you let private organizations work this out there's a lot more opportunity for people who need help to get help and I think that's really important we're running out of time but I want to ask to go back to this question of there was a libertarian wave I like to call it a libertarian moment which I think we're still living in but we don't understand rhetoric aside there's been a pause what are the best ways to kind of get libertarian ideas and sensibilities in front of young people to really energize the coming you're a millennial the world is getting young again and how do we make sure that these people are hearing and understanding and maybe being persuaded by libertarian ideas well for one thing we have to meet them where they are I spend a lot of time for example asking my kids which social media kids use these days exclusively pornhub in my experience there are a lot of places that the adults aren't so we might be on facebook my generation your generation other people are on x or twitter and there are other people on tiktok and so you have to meet them where they are and if they're not on x and it's still weird calling it x if they're not on x and you are well they're not hearing your message so that's an issue that we need to work on I'm probably reaching primarily gen x and millennial people on x and I'm probably not reaching gen z people as well so I think we need to work on getting them in those places and also I think people who have libertarian instincts people who are who want to present libertarianism go speak to students at schools I used to do this as a member of congress I used that opportunity as much as I could when schools would invite me I'd say yes I'd be happy to come to the school to speak to the students and take all their questions and be open about being a libertarian tell them frankly that your philosophy is libertarianism and talk to them about it I think it's great a lot of teachers end up surprised they walk away saying I've had many teachers walk up to me and say like whisper to me I think I'm a libertarian too after having the conversation because they have stereotypes about what it might mean to be a libertarian and you have the opportunity to change their mind final question I have seen a lot of chatter I have actually helped publish a lot of chatter that you may be running for the US senate from the mediocre state of Michigan do you have an announcement that you would like to make so as a part of the national championship winning state of Michigan this year yeah I am exploring a run for senate the the FEC requires me to state that I am not a candidate for senate but I am exploring a run for senate and if you are interested in checking it out go to exploratory.justinamash.com and I am giving it serious thought I think that there is an opportunity for libertarians this year and there is an opportunity to win a republican senate seat this year so I am looking at the republican primary and I think this is probably the best shot libertarians have had in a long time in the state of Michigan thank you very much justinamash thanks thanks thanks everyone