The last honest man in Congress: Rep. Justin Amash on Capitol Hill skullduggery, surveillance surprises, and how Donald Trump 'could be very dangerous as president'.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Interview

SINCE REP.JUSTIN AMASH (R-Mich.) first entered Congress in January 2011, there have been more than 3,500 roll call votes in the House of Representatives. Amash hasn't missed a single one.

When former Speaker of the House John Boehner--whom Amash helped push out of his leadership role last fall--used to preside over "pro forma" sessions during which most members were away from Washington, the libertarian-leaning congressman would always attend, just to make sure Boehner didn't try to sneak a voice-vote extension of the PATRIOT Act. "Trust but verify," the Michigan maverick would say, quoting Ronald Reagan's famous line about the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons negotiations. Yes, Amash speaks of his own party the way Reagan spoke of the Russkies.

There is ample reason for such a skeptical approach. In mid-December, President Barack Obama signed into law a hastily thrown togetiier 2,242-page $1.8 trillion omnibus spending bill that didn't just make a mockery of prior Republican commitments to keep federal spending in check; it included a series of last-minute insertions, many of them anathema to fiscal responsibility and constitutional restraint. (See "What is Congress Hiding?" page 18.) Among the non-debated provisions was the 100-page Cybersecurity Act of 2015, which drastically expanded the federal government's ability to scoop up Americans' digital information without a warrant. "I asked the chairman of Homeland Security whether the cyber bill was going to be included in the omnibus," Amash says,"and he didn't know." The congressman promptly authored a straight-up repeal.

Though often touted (including in this magazine) as the House's most obvious successor to Ron Paul, Amash is not a lone-wolf "Dr. No." His is one of the most influential voices in the House Freedom Caucus, a 40-member bloc of constitutional conservatives who were pivotal in Boehner's ouster and the selection of his replacement, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc). When Amash says "I want to give Paul Ryan a chance to see how he operates with a full year," that is not just some idle personal observation.

If the Republican-controlled 114th Congress is going to amount to anything useful from a libertarian point of view, Amash will be central in that effort. If not, he will be one of the loudest canaries in the Capitol Hill coal mine.

reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch spoke with Amash in his congressional office in Washington, D.C., this January.

reason: When the Republicans took the Senate, there was a lot of talk that they were going to restore both fiscal responsibility and procedural responsibility. Here we are, 10 days after another omnibus bill. What happened?

Justin Amash: They're always promising that next time we'll be better. "We need the House," then "we need the Senate," then "we need the White House," then "we need a supermajority"--it seems like they're never really interested in actually doing anything in the present. The excuse is usually that we don't have the votes or we don't have the right president to sign the bill, but that highlights the problem with their thinking. They're not interested in persuading people. They're interested in waiting.

reason: You have to wait until the next election and then maybe tip the numbers a little bit more?

Amash: Their hope is that people will for some reason elect more Republicans.

We've had a good run in the House. We have a large majority right now. I think there are a lot of reasons for that--and I do think redistricting and some of the gerrymandering around the country helped with that. But if your idea is simply to wait for the White House and the supermajority in the Senate, good luck. You're likely never to get everything you want.

reason: When Republicans just had the House, you were able to get a sequestration deal to have conversations about long-term entitlement reform, to flatten the growth of spending for a couple of years, and to actually cut some military spending in real terms. Then Republicans got the Senate and that was all ripped and blown up. The fiscal responsibility is less now than it was in 2012.

Amash: Yeah. And people forget that the sequester and the budget caps were already a consolation compared to what we should have had, which was a much more significant cut in spending in exchange for the increase in the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling was increased at the time by something like $2 trillion, and the proposed reductions in spending--they're not really cuts, even, they're reductions in the growth rate--amounted to something like $200 billion. So it already wasn't nearly what we needed.

I asked Speaker Boehner in our conference meeting, "How do we know that we don't pass this sequester now and then in the near future we reverse it and eliminate all of the cuts." And he got upset with me, actually. He said, "To do that...