Justin Amash Attacks Donald Trump’s Deal For Budget And Debt Ceiling As A Reflection Of ‘Our Broken Process’
Former Republican Justin Amash, who left the GOP to become independent, took to Twitter Tuesday to blast President Donald Trump’s announcement of the deal for a a two-year budget and debt ceiling reached by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
“More spending. More debt. More failure of representation. This ‘deal’ reflects our broken process,” he tweeted.
“A few ‘leaders’ dictate terms to everyone else. They don’t care how bad the ‘deal’ is for America, as long as they maintain power. They then bribe and punish others to get it done.”
Amash has been vocal about what he calls a broken Congress that he believes stems from a two-party system that is in a “partisan death spiral.” During his piece for The Washington Post, in which he announced his departure from the Republican Party, Amash highlighted that the first U.S. president, George Washington, was so disturbed by the formation of political parties in America that he devoted a large portion of his farewell address to warning about partisanship.
Washington acknowledged that while partisanship is “inseparable from our nature,” it is the people’s “worst enemy.”
“The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” Washington said, adding that eventually, the leader of a prevailing faction ?— “more able or more fortunate than his competitors” ?— will harness partisanship for his own benefit at the cost of public liberty.
In his piece, Amash said that Americans have ignored the “most basic tenets of our constitutional order.” He also suggested that political parties value winning for its own sake, no matter the cost.
Rep. Justin Amash is leaving the GOP. ‘Modern politics is trapped in a partisan death spiral,’ he writes in The Post. https://t.co/a6fn3YMFY1
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 4, 2019
Per The Inquistr, a book by Tim Alberta called American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump revealed year-old interviews with Amash that highlight how his displeasure with the Republican Party and the two-party system didn’t come out of nowhere. In one interview, Amash criticized his former party for treating politics as a “cosmic battle” between “good and evil.”
According to the libertarian-leaning representative, the GOP believes that the right is on the side of good and the left is on the side of evil, and any criticism of Trump is perceived as helping the other side ?— the side of evil.
But in the process, Amash believes that Republicans aren’t just hurting themselves, but also damaging the country as a whole.
