The Never Trumpers Say No Thank You to Justin Amash

They may have more in common with the conservative congressman, but Republicans looking to oust Trump are all in on Joe Biden

Rep. Justin Amash on the House steps of the Capitol before the House passed the Coronavirus aid package on March 27, 2020. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images

Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project PAC, is an old-school Republican: She values limited government and personal freedom. It would be a fair question, then, to ask whether she would be supporting Rep. Justin Amash, the former Republican from Michigan who announced last week he will seek the Libertarian Party’s nomination for president.

On paper, at least, the Lincoln Project and Amash would seem like a good fit. The Lincoln Project was created in late 2019 as a way to both hold Trump-supporting Republicans accountable and antagonize the president. A recent ad produced by the PAC titled “Mourning in America” seemed to accomplish that latter objective, prompting Trump to lash out on Twitter and label the group “the loser’s project.”

Amash left the GOP to become an independent in July 2019 due to his vocal opposition to Trump; he later became the only non-Democrat in the House to vote to impeach the president. He also founded the House Freedom Caucus in 2015, a group that’s proven to be a crucial conservative bloc on a number of partisan votes. On the surface, Horn and her co-founders share a good many of the same values with the congressman — more values, at least, than she shares with President Trump or his Democratic opponent.

But Horn says she has no interest in standing with Amash. In fact, neither Horn nor any of her colleagues at the Lincoln Project seemed particularly supportive of his presidential bid. If anything, they were wary that it might lead to four more years of the man they so publicly loathe. “If you believe Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic, and I would suggest that most libertarians probably would embrace that idea, then removing him from the White House is your absolute number one priority,” Horn said. “If that is your priority, then you have to vote for the person who is best positioned to do that.”

That person, of course, is Joe Biden.