President Trump doesn’t need the Koch brothers; Steve Bannon is warning Republican candidates to steer clear of them, too.
The Trumpian dismissal of the billionaire libertarian benefactors of Republicans and free-market causes comes as the administration has divided even the small faction of libertarian-leaning GOP members of Congress.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., confirmed on Monday he would vote for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh despite concerns over his Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., has opposed Kavanaugh from the beginning.
Paul gets a vote on Kavanaugh and Amash doesn’t. But Amash’s mounting criticism of Trump is getting plenty of attention. New York Times conservative Ross Douthat devoted a column to the Paul-Amash split on Trump. It was a major theme of a Washington Post story by Dave Weigel, a veteran of Ron Paul presidential campaign coverage.
“It was all ‘owning the libs,’ as they say,” Amash complained to the Post about his Republican colleagues’ resolution supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement against a liberal campaign to abolish it, after abolishing its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, was once “a mainstream, conservative viewpoint.”
Some of this is rooted in older intra-libertarian debates. “It’s nice to see a leading libertarian Republican like Amash making the case for free trade when about 10 years ago, the leading libertarian Republican voice in Congress largely cut an anti-free trade profile which always struck a lot of libertarians as philosophically inconsistent and economically illiterate, as well as pandery to some more nativist elements of the electorate, some of whom have since been drawn to Trump,” said Liz Mair, a GOP strategist who backed Republican ex-governor-turned-Libertarian-Party-presidential-nominee Gary Johnson over Trump in 2016.
Other elements of the dispute are more recent. Trump upended the “libertarian moment” in the GOP, preventing someone like Paul or even Texas Sen. Ted Cruz from capturing the party’s presidential nomination and reorienting Tea Party activism away from government-cutting outside of taxes and regulation.
Mostly it reflects different strategies for capitalizing on Trump and the upheaval inside the GOP. Paul has tried to use Trump’s “America First” impulses, penchant for talking to hostile foreign governments, skepticism of regime change in the Middle East and complaints about being surveilled to mainstream his own arguments on foreign policy and civil liberties with the very Republicans who have been most hostile to them — and also the president himself.
“It would be great if we had a president who didn’t have to personalize these things so much,” said a Republican aligned with Paul. “But this is the only way to work with the president we have.”
Amash instead sees Trump as someone who hasn’t materially altered the country’s post-Sept. 11 foreign policy or succeeded at his diplomatic overtures while imposing tariffs, increasing spending, and growing government (Paul has also opposed Trump on these fronts). Ideological consistency prevents him from granting partisan assent.
Paul represents a state where Trump is popular both with the Republican base and the broader electorate. Small-government Trump detractors representing such jurisdictions haven’t fared well. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., is retiring, and Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., lost a primary. The president effectively chased them both out of Congress.
For his part, Amash represents a relatively centrist district where his libertarianism has allowed him to compile a more conservative voting record than might otherwise have been tolerated. And some heterodox lawmakers, like Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., have survived repeated primary challenges in unlikely conditions.
The split mirrors a dilemma faced by the party as a whole: to connect with, and try to lead, an unruly base, and risk association with a president who may discredit Republicans in the eyes of new voters they need to reach. Or, alternatively, to risk going hunting where the ducks aren’t.
“People who read Hayek, read Ayn Rand, read Bastiat — these people are not going with Trump,” Amash told the Post. These people are not going to be as numerous as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez millennials or their Trump-voting elders either, at least for the non-libertarian moment.
