“Congressman Thomas Massie, of beautiful Kentucky, is an automatic ‘NO’ vote on just about everything…HE SHOULD BE PRIMARIED, and I will lead the charge against him. He’s just another GRANDSTANDER, who’s too much trouble, and not worth the fight. He reminds me of Liz Chaney (sic) before her historic, record-breaking fall (loss!). The people of Kentucky won’t stand for it, just watch. DO I HAVE ANY TAKERS???” So wrote the President of the United States on his social media platform, Truth Social, on the evening of March 10th.
The President’s outburst had its origins in Congressman Massie’s refusal to support a continuing resolution in advance of a possible government shutdown. Congressman Massie, a staunch budget hawk, is often one of the lone voices pleading for fiscal restraint regardless of which party controls Washington, D.C. at a given time.
In Congressman Massie’s view, Republicans, when in the minority, promise their voters that they will work to begin scaling back, even slightly, the dizzying level of national debt or government waste but then reverse course once in the majority. As the Congressman notably argued in a clip that was widely shared last September, both Republicans and Democrats “are addicted to spending.” In the Kentuckian’s view, any apparent efforts on the part of conservatives to reign in spending on the federal government amount to little more than “political theatre” because each year, in the end, they join hands with Democrats to continue the ever-increasing spending.
Congressman Massie routinely votes against spending bills, even if he must do so alone. Perhaps, most famously, he demanded members of Congress return to Washington D.C. to vote in person on a $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill in March of 2020, with the idea being that House members should be required to consider carefully and put their names to the largest spending bill in American history. Massie, at the time, worried about the potential for government overreach during the pandemic response and also feared “pork” was finding its way into a bill that massive. He instead argued that “Congress should pass separate bills to deal with corona virus and I could probably vote for some of them. (I voted for the first corona virus bill).” The bill—in the end—passed, and many of Massie’s concerns were later widely determined to have been valid. (It should be noted, though, that Massie has received criticism for being apparently more receptive to federal spending when his home state is the one uniquely affected by a crisis, but he might counter that these bills had targeted rather than sweeping spending.)
Similarly, Massie, like Congressman Ron Paul before him, is no stranger to being the lone congressional voice against various other House measures. In 2019, for example, he voted against the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019. (It passed 407-1.) A man known for saying “If we just voted based on the names of the bills, I’d vote for almost all of them,” he argues that when one actually reads the text of many bills, there are often either concerning elements in the fine print or portions that exceed the authority given to Congress by the Constitution.
In many cases, his principled stances earns him the respect of his colleagues, such as when Utah Senator Mike Lee said of Massie: “I don’t know a member of Congress more principled or dedicated to the Constitution.” And, in 2022, President Trump—despite previous spats with Massie that encouraged a primary challenge—enthusiastically endorsed the Congressman’s re-election, describing him at the time as a “Conservative Warrior” and a “first-rate Defender of the Constitution.”
While I—and most Americans, for that matter—do not always agree with the positions Massie takes, that’s hardly the point. The more fundamental concern is having political parties (in the United States, there are, in practice, only two) that are unable to tolerate even a single dissenting voice. Majorities, as we know, are hardly infallible. In 2019, I strongly criticized the Democratic Party for its efforts to end the career of House Democrat Jeff Van Drew for diverging from most of his colleagues in voting against the first impeachment of President Trump. Parties, I argued then, need an in-house critic, who shares their worldview and philosophical commitments, to remind them when they’ve gone too far.
Most House Republicans agree in principle with Massie but still vote for more and more spending and, thus, are voting in tension with what their constituents have asked of them. Politics is, of course, an exercise in pragmatism, and refusing ever to compromise is more befitting of a talk radio show host than an elected representative. But, on the other hand, at some point, the American government must actually fix its problems instead of endlessly kicking the can down the road. It is admittedly quite difficult to resolve serious national problems, like the untenable level of national debt, and, as Oklahoma Senator James Lankford argues in his recent book Turnaround, people, and especially politicians, tend to ignore problems, even significant ones, until they become so acute it’s no longer possible to turn a blind eye. Massie, at the heart of the matter, is pleading with his colleagues to address in a comprehensive way excessive government spending and waste, something President Trump has promised time and again to do (and is, in other ways, actively working toward).
Congressman Massie remains confident that this whole matter will “blow over,” and that President Trump’s ire toward him will be fleeting, assuaged by the knowledge that the continuing resolution—in the end—did pass the House of Representatives. I hope Massie is correct. It would be supremely unfortunate for the President of the United States to prove himself incapable of listening to criticism from his ideological kin. We do not want a Democratic Party that demands its members vote in complete lockstep, sacrificing its members’ individual thinking for unquestioning fealty to the demands of party leaders. And we should not want that of the Republican Party either. I hope Massie is correct. It would be supremely unfortunate for the President of the United States to prove himself incapable of listening to criticism from his ideological kin. (And already certain advocacy groups, heeding the President’s call, are committing financial resources to backing a primary challenger.) We do not want a Democratic Party that demands its members vote in complete lockstep, sacrificing its members’ individual thinking for unquestioning fealty to the demands of party leaders. And we should not want that of the Republican Party either.
