Hooray for Justin Amash Quitting the Republican Party

Last updated on: July 4, 2019 at 8:05 pm by Kermit Zarley

Hooray for Justin Amash Quitting the Republican Party 2019-07-04T20:05:02-07:00 Kermit Zarley

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Republican Representative Justin Amash of Michigan announced today in an op-ed, which he wrote and was published in The Washington Post today, that he has quit the Republican Party and is now a political Independent. This was quite a symbolical move, coming on July 4th, which is America’s holiday called Independence Day. This self-confessed “libertarian” really needed to do this since he had announced on May 19th that, on account of the Mueller report, Republican President Donald Trump should be impeached.

Justin Amash is an articulate, thirty-nine year-old lawyer and now a politician. His Christian parents–a Palestinian father and Syrian mother–immigrated to the U.S. before Justin was born. Justin and his wife, Kara, are Eastern Orthodox Christians. They married after he graduated from the University of Michigan and she graduated from the Christian school Calvin College. I used to drive past that school everyday during the week when I played for several years in the PGA Tour’s Senior Tour’s tournament there in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Justin Amash is still the only Republican member of Congress who has called for President Donald Trump’s impeachment. Yet the Mueller report records about ten incidents in which President Trump may have obstructed justice, contrary to his false claims about the report, that it contains “no collusion, no obstruction” of justice. But due to the Office of Legal Counsel’s guidelines, the report explains that the Mueller investigative team was not permitted to accuse a sitting president of criminality. In my opinion, and that of perhaps most American voters, that ruling makes the president “above the law.” If true, that conflicts with the history of how the USA was created.

Attorney-politician Justin Amash explained in May concerning the Mueller report, “Some of the president’s actions were inherently corrupt. Other actions were corrupt, and therefore impeachable, because the president took them to serve his own interests.”

Amash revealed in his op-ed piece today, “In recent years, I’ve become disenchanted with party politics and frightened by what I see from it. The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions.”

Indeed, I started saying about five years ago that the predominantly two-party system of American politics is not working well and that there needs to be a third, viable political party. See my post, “The Republican Party’s Reputation Is Shot to Hell.” One of my reasons has been that more American voters now identify themselves as politically “independent”–as I have for many years–than they identify as either Democrat or Republican. Thus, there needs to be a political party that stands for some of its principles and policies being somewhere in between those of these two parties.

Today, after President Trump read Amash’s op-ed, Trump tweeted that Representative Amash is “one of the dumbest and most disloyal men in Congress, . . . a total loser.” Mr. Trump, can you find some other words in the dictionary besides constantly calling people “dumb” or “losers”? Or do you ever look at a dictionary? Donald Trump’s vocabulary is notoriously deficient.

Justin Amash, when asked, has not denied that he might run for the U.S. presidency in 2020. If he does, he would join the surging Democratic challenger for president, Representative Kamal Harris of California, as former attorneys who I think would overwhelmingly win a debate against the political neophyte and extremely inarticulate Donald Trump. In such a fight, I think The Donald–who sometimes talks like a Mafia mobster–would look like that diapered Baby Trump balloon that has been floated in England when Trump visited there and is now airborne today in the nation’s celebrating capitol.

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