Is Justin Amash Doomed?

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Republican bigwigs hope the 2014 elections will be just like the 2010 midterms, except without the great unwashed masses of the Tea Party mucking things up. This time, the Republican establishment is launching a few primary challenges of its own.

Sitting atop the target list is Justin Amash, the second-term congressman from Michigan. Dubbed the “most liberal Republican” by Karl Rove, Amash is a favorite of the Club for Growth, Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, and other Tea Party groups. But GOP moderates hope Gerald Ford’s former district isn’t an ideal base for the most influential Ron Paul Republican outside of libertarianism’s first family.

Brian Ellis is Amash’s business-backed challenger and he is opting for a horseshoes strategy against the incumbent; he wants to hit Amash from both the left and the right. When it comes to defunding Obamacare and shutting down the government, Ellis will portray Amash as an uncompromising ideologue. On foreign policy and other issues, Ellis will say Amash isn’t enough of a Republican team player.

For example, Amash has emerged as a leader in the bipartisan coalition to rein in the federal government’s data-gathering and surveillance practices. Ellis emphasizes that he thinks Edward Snowden is a “flat-out traitor.”

So according to Ellis, Amash is too much like Ted Cruz and Ted Kennedy. But he’s careful not to take the critique too far. He says he is just as gung ho against Obamacare. And he is also willing to rein in the National Security Agency.

Ellis dislikes it when Amash votes against seemingly conservative bills based on constitutional technicalities. But some of his complaints against Amash sound awfully technical themselves.

In an interview with the Weekly Standard, Ellis attacked his opponent’s constitutional scruples in terms that belong in every Amash ad from here until the primary. Amash should stop voting against bills because he thinks they violate the Constitution, he suggested. “If something is unconstitutional, we have a court system that looks at that,” Ellis said.

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I don’t think Justin Amash cares if Bank of America gives to him or not,” a bewildered lobbyist was quoted as saying in article about Wall Street’s distaste for the Tea Party. What would you rather your congressman care about: Bank of America or the Constitution?

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