Justin Amash

Explore about the Famous Politician Justin Amash, who was born in United States on April 18, 1980. Analyze Justin Amash’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Justin Amash dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Justin Amash?

Justin Amash Biography

U.S. politician and American attorney who is known for his work as a republican member of congress, often with dissident views. He has also served as a a member of the Michigan House of Representatives. He is known for identifying as a libertarian Republican and is considering an Independent opposition run for President against Donald Trump during the 2020 election.

He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan with his B.A. in economics. He then earned his JD from the University of Michigan Law School in 2005. He started his career as a corporate attorney for his families business before being elected to the Michigan House of Representatives in 2008.

He is known for having been the only representative to oppose federal aid in response to the Flint water crisis. He is also known for having been one of the 16 republicans who voted against the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

He was born and raised in Grand Rapids and married Kara Amash. Together they have three children.

He is known for having donated to and assisted with the campaigns of Ron Paul and John McCain.

Justin Amash was born on April 18, 1980, in Grand Rapids, Michigan to Arab Christians who immigrated to the United States. His father, Attallah Amash, is a Palestinian Christian who immigrated to the United States in 1956 at age 16 through the sponsorship of an American pastor and his family. His mother Mimi is a Syrian Christian who met his father through family friends in Damascus, Syria, and the two married in 1974.

Justin Amash (/ə ˈ m ɑː ʃ / ; born April 18, 1980) is an American lawyer and politician who has served as the U.S. Representative for Michigan’s 3rd congressional district since 2011. Originally a member of the Republican Party, Amash became an independent in July 2019 before joining the Libertarian Party in April 2020. Amash is the first member of the Libertarian Party to serve in either house of Congress.

Amash was raised in Kentwood, Michigan. He first attended Kelloggsville Christian School in Kentwood, then attended Grand Rapids Christian High School, from which he graduated in 1998 as class valedictorian. He then attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics with high honors. He stayed at the university to attend the University of Michigan Law School, graduating with a Juris Doctor in 2005.

Glenn D. Steil Jr., the incumbent state representative for Michigan’s 72nd House District, was unable to run for reelection in the 2008 election due to term limits. Amash ran in the Republican primary and defeated four other candidates before defeating Democratic nominee Albert Abbasse in the general election.

After graduating from law school, Amash spent less than a year as an attorney at the Grand Rapids law firm Varnum. He then became a consultant to Michigan Industrial Tools Inc. (also known as Tekton Inc.), a company his father founded and owned. He worked for his family’s business for a year before being elected to the Michigan House of Representatives in 2008. Amash’s two brothers also have positions at Michigan Industrial Tools.

While running for the House of Representatives in 2010, Amash supported the Defense of Marriage Act, but in 2013 he advocated repealing it, saying that the “real threat to traditional marriage & religious liberty is government, not gay couples who love each other & want to spend lives together”. He supported the result of Obergefell v. Hodges (in which the Supreme Court held that same-sex couples cannot be deprived of the fundamental right to marry) on the grounds that government-issued marriage licenses should not be “necessary to validate the intimate relationships of consenting adults.”

On March 17, 2010, Amash was the only member of the Michigan House of Representatives to vote against making benzylpiperazine a schedule 1 drug, saying that penalties for nonviolent crimes shouldn’t be increased.

On February 9, 2010, Amash announced that he would run for the Republican nomination for Michigan’s third congressional district and the next day incumbent Representative Vern Ehlers announced that he would not seek reelection. During the primary campaign he was endorsed by Betsy and Dick DeVos, the Club for Growth, Representative Ron Paul, and FreedomWorks PAC. In the Republican primary he defeated four other candidates and shortly before the general election he was named as one of Time magazine’s “40 under 40 – Rising Stars of U.S. Politics”. During the campaign he advocated politics supported by the Tea Party movement and defeated Democratic nominee Patrick Miles Jr. in the general election.

Amash represented the 72nd district in the Michigan House of Representatives for one term before being elected to Congress in 2010. From January 2011 to January 2019, Amash missed only one of 5,374 roll call votes although he has been criticized for his high number of present votes. Amash chaired the Liberty Caucus and is the first and only Libertarian to hold a seat in Congress. Amash received national attention when he became the first Republican congressman to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump, a position he maintained after leaving the party.

In 2011, Amash was one of six members of Congress who voted against House Resolution 268 reaffirming U.S. commitment to a negotiated settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through direct Israeli–Palestinian negotiation, which passed with 407 members in support. In 2014 he was one of eight members of Congress who voted against a $225 million package to restock Israel’s Iron Dome missile defenses, which passed with 398 members in support. He supports a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

He believes only Congress has the power to declare war, and has criticized multiple military actions taken by Presidents Obama and Trump. In July 2011, he sponsored an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act that would have prevented funding for operations against Gaddafi’s government and Amash later stated that President Obama’s actions during the Libyan Civil War were unconstitutional without authorization from Congress. He criticized President Obama’s intervention in Syria against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant for proceeding without a Congressional declaration of war.

He voted against the 2011 reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act, the 2012 reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act, and the USA Freedom Act.

Amash has criticized the Environmental Protection Agency, arguing that many environmental regulations are overreaching. He voted in favor of the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, which would have amended the Clean Air Act of 1963 to prohibit the EPA from regulating specified greenhouse gases as air pollutants. In a 2017 debate Amash “exaggerated uncertainty around the basics of climate science” – specifically, the scientific consensus that carbon emissions cause climate change. He opposed Obama’s decision to sign the Paris Agreement to combat climate change. Amash voted against legislation to block Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement and in favor of legislation “expressing the sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy.”

In 2011, Amash introduced H.J. Res. 81, a Constitutional amendment proposal that would require a balanced budget over the business cycle with a ten-year transition to balance. That same year, he was one of four House Republicans who joined 161 Democrats to oppose an alternative balanced budget resolution without a federal spending cap, that would have required annual balance, that would have put the President’s budget in the Constitution, and that could have created a perverse incentive for military conflict to avoid balance.

Amash voted “present”, rather than “yes” or “no”, on the 2011 Full Year Continuing Appropriations Act, which provided for the cessation of federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Although he supports eliminating federal funding for Planned Parenthood, he abstained from defunding legislation, arguing that “legislation that names a specific private organization to defund (rather than all organizations that engage in a particular activity) is improper” and an “arguably unconstitutional” bill of attainder.

In 2011, Amash endorsed Representative Ron Paul’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2015, he endorsed Senator Rand Paul’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and later endorsed Senator Ted Cruz after Paul dropped out.

Amash joined 104 Democrats and 16 Republicans in voting against the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which specified the budget and expenditures of the Department of Defense, calling it “one of the most anti-liberty pieces of legislation of our lifetime”. Amash co-sponsored an amendment to the NDAA that would ban indefinite military detention and military trials so that all terror suspects arrested in the United States would be tried in civilian courts. He expressed concern that individuals charged with terrorism could be jailed for prolonged periods of time without ever being formally charged or brought to trial.

In May 2012, Amash was one of seven Republicans to vote against the Prenatal Non-Discrimination Act, which would have made it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion on a woman who wants to end a pregnancy based on the gender of the fetus. He criticized the bill as ineffective and virtually impossible to enforce, and said Congress “should not criminalize thought”, while maintaining that he believes “all abortion should be illegal”.

The House Republican Steering Committee removed Amash from the House Budget Committee on December 3, 2012, as part of a larger party leadership-caucus shift. He joined Representatives Tim Huelskamp and David Schweikert in a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner, demanding to know why they had lost their committee positions. A spokesperson for Republican Congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia said that Amash, Huelskamp, and Schweikert had been removed for “their inability to work with other members.” Politico said that the three were “the first members pulled off committees as punishment for political or personality reasons in nearly two decades”.

At a January 2013 town hall event, Amash responded to a question about immigration reform, “I don’t think you can just grab people and deport them…I think we need to have a system that is sympathetic to people, looks at their situations and allows as many people to stay here as possible.” On March 21, 2013, he and five other representatives signed a letter to U.S. Senator Rand Paul supporting immigration reform in the form of a “three-pronged stool” of border security, expanding legal immigration and “addressing” immigrants who came here “knowingly and illegally”. In August he explained his support for immigration reform, saying improving the legal immigration system to make it more accessible would lead to fewer illegal border crossings. He announced his support for a path to legal status for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. He also supported an eventual path to citizenship once the undocumented obtained legal status.

In 2013, Amash and 15 other members of Congress filed an amicus brief in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court supporting the release of the Court’s unpublished opinions regarding the “meaning, scope, and constitutionality” of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. On June 12, 2013, he called for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to resign due to him stating that the NSA did not collect data at a Senate committee hearing in March.

In November 2011, he was one of nine representatives who voted against a House resolution that affirmed In God We Trust as the official motto of the United States and was the only Republican to do so. On February 13, 2013, he voted against the Federal Disaster Assistance Nonprofit Fairness Act of 2013, which would make all places of religious worship eligible for FEMA grants, stating that bill “skews the law away from fairness by making religious buildings automatically eligible for reconstruction aid when other entities aren’t”.

In 2013, Amash was one of two Republicans to vote in favor of closing Guantanamo Bay and transferring its detainees. The amendment by Representative Adam Smith would have eliminated all funding for the detention facility by December 31, 2014, removed all limitations on the transfer of detainees, removed a ban on the transfer of detainees to the United States and removed statutes that had banned the use of taxpayer funds for the construction of facilities in the United States for those detainees. It failed on a 174-249 vote.

Following the retirement of Senator Carl Levin it was speculated that Amash would run in the 2014 Senate election and Senator Mike Lee encouraged him to run, but Amash chose to run for reelection to the House.

In 2016, Amash made headlines by joining the list of Republicans who opposed the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump. After Trump was elected president, the Huffington Post profiled him in an article titled “The One House Republican Who Can’t Stop Criticizing Donald Trump”; Amash said, “I’m not here to represent a particular political party; I’m here to represent all of my constituents and to follow the Constitution.”

On March 14, 2016, Amash joined the unanimous vote in the House to approve a resolution declaring the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to be committing genocide against religious minorities in the Middle East (it passed 383–0), but joined Representatives Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) in voting against a separate measure creating an international tribunal to try those accused of participating in the alleged atrocities (it passed 392–3).

On March 14, 2016, Amash joined the unanimous vote in the House to approve a resolution declaring the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to be committing genocide against religious minorities in the Middle East (it passed 383–0), but joined Representatives Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) in voting against a separate measure creating an international tribunal to try those accused of participating in the alleged atrocities (it passed 392–3).

In May 2017, Trump was accused of pressuring fired FBI director James Comey to end an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Amash and Carlos Curbelo were the first Republican members of Congress to publicly state that the allegations, if proven true, merited impeachment.

In April 2017, Dan Scavino, a senior Trump White House aide, called for Amash to be defeated in a Republican primary challenge. Amash later called Trump a “childish bully.”

After Representative John Lewis (D-GA) said that Trump was not a “legitimate president,” Trump sent out a series of tweets on January 14, 2017, criticizing Lewis. Amash responded to Trump’s tweets with one of his own: “Dude, just stop.” Amash later explained, “The reason I did it is he wouldn’t stop … The way he feels so slighted about everything I think is not healthy for our country.” Amash felt that Lewis’s comments were “inappropriate” but said that Trump’s response should have been “dignified and conciliatory to the extent possible” instead of “personal jabs, attacking his district”.

What's Justin Amash Net Worth 2024

Justin Amash Family