Video: Rep. Justin Amash on Debt, Abortion, Immigration, and More

Texas Gov. Rick Perry made an impromptu appearance at a recent
CPAC party, stealing the spotlight from Rep. Justin Amash
(R-Mich.) as he was addressing the crowd. Amash would
later jokingly
tweet that Perry “crashed” his event.

You can check out Reason TV’s in-depth, Rick Perry free
interview with Amash from April 1, 2013. Original writeup is
below:

“If you allow people to make people to make their own decisions,
you actually get good outcomes for society,” says Rep. Justin Amash
in his recent interview with Reason Magazine’s Nick Gillespie. “And
that really is something that I think about a lot as a
legislator.”

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), often touted as “the
next Ron Paul” had a rocky start to his second term in
Congress. After overcoming a redistricting effort to win
re-election by a comfortable margin in November, Amash was welcomed
back to Washington with a pink slip: He and a group of
libertarian-leaning backbenchers were stripped of their committee
assignments by the GOP leadership. Adding insult to injury, the
party establishment claimed that the rebuke wasn’t ideological;
that it had more to do with what Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.)
termed “the
asshole factor.”

Amash, seen as the ringleader of the House “liberty movement,”
responded by leading a failed coup against House Speaker John
Boehner (R-Ohio) in what was supposed to be a rubber-stamped
re-election as majority leader. Meanwhile, on a series of crucial
votes — the “fiscal cliff” tax hike in January and the March
agreement to raise the debt ceiling – Amash and several of
his uppity libertarian colleagues voted against party leadership.
If Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is the leading liberty-movement troublemaker
in the United States Senate, Amash is shaping up to be his main
counterpart in the House.

Endorsed by the Republican Liberty Caucus and Young Americans
for Liberty, the 33-year-old Amash has made waves by explaining all of his
votes on social media, a practice he began during his single
term as a Michigan state legislator. He has earned a 100 percent
rating from the fiscally conservative Club for Growth, and has
taken up where Ron Paul left off on civil liberties.

The son of Syrian and Palestinian immigrants, Amash has made a
name for himself as a non-interventionist. “It’s very dangerous if
we get in the habit of deciding who the good guys are and who the
bad guys are,” he says of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and other
unsavory characters. He’s also a social conservative, describing
himself as “100 percent pro-life,” but opining that ultimately,
“marriage is a private contract that has nothing to do with
government.”

In March, ReasonTV Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie interviewed
Amash in his office, where the walls are adorned with likenesses of
Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Carl Menger,
Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand.

Runs about 38 minutes.