Justin Amash on Why Congress Is Broken
Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are two of the questions Reason’s Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash in February at Students for Liberty’s LibertyCon. Amash, the Palestinian-Syrian-American former five-term congressman from Michigan, is now running for Senate as a Republican.
First elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. During the first impeachment of President Donald Trump, Amash resigned from the GOP, became an independent, and voted to impeach. He joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only Libertarian to serve in Congress.
Q: Why is Congress broken, and how do we fix it?
A: 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. 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. It’s really a small subset of people that you have to negotiate with. When that happens, it gives the president so much leverage.
When we talk about things like going to war without
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