Justin Amash Blasts Donald Trump’s Attack On Fellow Congressman Thomas Massie
On Saturday, Independent Rep. Justin Amash took aim at Donald Trump‘s recent attack on Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who received a bipartisan lambasting for attempting to hold up the coronavirus aid bill before it passed on Friday.
“It’s like the president fed a Thomas Massie word cloud to an AI tweet generator,” Amash tweeted.
Massie forced congressional lawmakers to vote for the $2 trillion aid bill in-person on Friday, which led to Trump lashing out on Twitter.
“By empowering the Radical Left Democrats, do nothing Kentucky politician @RepThomasMassie is making their War on the 2nd Amendment more and more difficult to win (But don’t worry, we will win anyway!),” the president tweeted.
“He is a disaster for America, and for the Great State of Kentucky!”
Later on Saturday morning, Amash, who TIME reported voted present on the last coronavirus aid bill, posted a follow-up in which he pointed out that more bills will be proposed under the COVID-19 crisis and appeared to agree with Massie’s decision to force an in-person vote.
“The speaker must quickly establish procedures to ensure the House has robust debates and recorded votes,” he wrote.
“We can’t allow this crisis to be used as an excuse to discard representative government and accountability.”
Amash echoed Massie, who accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of attempting to force the bill through Congress without a recorded vote so that there would be no accountability for those who supported it. According to Massie, such a decision sets a bad precedent, and he said his political ploy was done in hopes that it would make Pelosi think twice about a similar course of action in the future.
.@RepThomasMassie: "I came here to make sure our republic doesn't die by unanimous consent in an empty chamber and I request a recorded vote."
"A recorded vote is refused…The chair will count for a quorum…A quorum is present. The motion is adopted." pic.twitter.com/kCXgDwAGvR
— CSPAN (@cspan) March 27, 2020
Both Amash and Massie are libertarian-leaning congressmen who have agreed with each other in the past. As reported by Reason, the pair both voted against the House’s anti-lynching bill, H.R. 35. According to the publication, the reason is that lynchings are already illegal in America, and the bill would effectively expand the death penalty via increased prosecutorial power.
In defense of his vote, Amash claimed that the bill would make various criminal conspiracies illegal despite not being related to lynching. He also said that Americans should work to abolish the death penalty as opposed to expanding it to additional crimes, as The Inquisitr reported.
As for Massie, he also noted the bill’s expansion of current law and suggested that enhancing penalties for hate crime laws, in particular, can endanger “other liberties,” including freedom of speech.
