No Country for Troublemakers

T wo troublemakers may be leaving our politics for good. Representatives Justin Amash and Tulsi Gabbard, increasingly at odds with their parties, declined to run for reelection to the House this year. And the tumultuous, improbable course of their political careers over the last decade tells us something unflattering about our two-party system, and the way Congress is organized.

There are striking similarities between Amash and Gabbard. Both, it could be said, were defined by their opposition to what they saw as the bipartisan failure of the Iraq War and America’s overly aggressive Middle East policy. Both of them vociferously opposed American intervention in Syria in 2013 and 2014. Opponents tend to think of both of them as not just wrong, but stubborn and immoral, and have occasionally alleged that they were compromised by unsavory outside interests.

Amash started as a hard-line libertarian Republican in the Tea Party Congress of 2010 and leaves as a political independent, with no natural constituency on the left (because of his libertarianism) or the right (because of his outspoken opposition to President Trump). Gabbard was considered a Democratic up-and-comer after her election in 2012, but alienated much of the party by clashing with leadership, supporting Bernie Sanders, and pursuing her own unique brand of moderate politics. She will exit Congress having been scolded as an apologist for dictators and a sympathizer with the religious Right.

In their final weeks, both are going out with a bang. They’ve each introduced a number of bills that defy the party labels they were originally elected to wear, and thus have no chance of passing. Gabbard has introduced one bill that would ban late-term abortions, another, co-sponsored by Republican Thomas Massie, that would repeal the Patriot Act, and another that would protect the original meaning of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, preventing the intrusion of transgender women into women’s sports. Amash has introduced one bill that would end civil-asset forfeiture, another that would provide more oversight of the FISA courts, and a third that would repeal the Jones Act, a protectionist measure that’s failed to help the American shipping industry as it was intended to.

Interestingly, both politicians’ worldviews have been shaped in part by their unique religious and ethnic backgrounds.

Amash is the son of a Palestinian Christian father and a Syrian Christian mother who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s. He belongs to the Antiochian Orthodox Church. During the controversy over Trump’s efforts to ban travel from certain Muslim countries, he joked ruefully that the travel ban explained his lateness for a congressional hearing as they were stopping “all Syrians” at the airports.

One can see Amash’s personal knowledge of and concern for the Middle East in a floor speech he gave in opposition to arming the so-called “moderate rebels” of Syria. “Would the groups assemble a coalition government of anti-Assad fighters, and would that coalition include ISIS? What would happen to the Alawites and Christians who stood with Assad?” he asked. Amash, as the son of Christian immigrants from the Middle East, knows all too well that the U.S. has a troubling history of supporting, either willfully or by happenstance, movements that seek to oppress Christians and other religious minorities in the region.

Tulsi Gabbard has avoided inquiries into her religious life, parrying them as Hinduphobic intrusions. But it’s known that she is a committed adherent of Gaudiya Vaishnava Hindu religious movement. This background obviously plays a role in her defenses of religious liberty, such as when she scolded Senator Mazie Hirono, her fellow Hawaii Democrat, for implying that a judicial nominee’s membership in the Catholic Knights of Columbus could disqualify him from serving on the bench. And it likely shapes her foreign-policy views, too. She framed her opposition to involvement in the Syrian Civil War as an absolute demand not to assist al-Qaeda or other Sunni Islamic terrorist groups. In explaining her position, she invoked her experiences serving in the U.S. military in Iraq after 9/11, but it would be foolish not to imagine that her background also played a part. After all, a minority Hindu congregation is exactly the kind of group that Islamist radicals target.

Another commonality is the way Gabbard and Amash clashed with their parties’ respective establishment. Gabbard was made a DNC vice chairwoman as a freshman representative. She began clashing with Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz during the 2016 presidential cycle, when Schultz seemed to openly favor Hilary Clinton by, among other things, artificially limiting the number of debates; she ended up resigning her position in protest and endorsing Bernie Sanders. Amash was thrown off the House Budget Committee in 2012 after criticizing the hammer-lock that House leaders held over the party’s agenda.

There is plenty one could criticize in the records that Amash and Gabbard have built during their tenures in Congress. I’m not a Sanders supporter, or a libertarian. Even where I agree with the two outgoing gadflies, I sometimes wouldn’t put my views in terms they’d accept. But each of them have demonstrated something a little too rare in our politics: They’ve brought considered judgment, and maybe even a dangerous sincerity, to office along with the usual ambition. There have been other figures who challenge the ideological drift of their parties — Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in particular comes to mind. But Moynihan rarely voted in a way that cost him politically. Amash and Gabbard have, and in so doing have revealed the narrowness of our deliberative bodies. For that, we owe them a debt of gratitude.