Rep. Thomas Massie is the sort of guy who drives the wrong way down a one-way street simply because he wants to. This time his excursion down that boulevard is leading to a head-on collision with a Mack truck that goes by the name of President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump, a fellow most Republicans avoid crossing at all costs.
It is the fabled encounter of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. As an engineer of some renown, Massie, R-SomewhereOrOtherLewisCounty, with two degrees from MIT and 30 patents, may have an idea of what to expect from such a crash. For the time being he’s just waving it off, insisting it will all blow over.
Perhaps.
The grudge match involving the two pig-headed men came to a boil on Tuesday when Massie served as the only Republican to oppose a continuing resolution slated to keep the government operating, in its eternally grinding fashion, through the end of September, a move necessitated by the chamber’s earlier inability to adopt a spending plan for the current fiscal year, a malady that has encumbered the institution for some years now.
Trump, seeking to avoid a government shutdown that might further imperil his already rocky first couple of months in the White House, actively lobbied GOP lawmakers to embrace the plan, aware that minority Democrats, whose input was not sought on the particulars of the package, would advise him to go pound sand if he came calling.
Holding only a slim four-seat advantage in the lower chamber, Trump and House Republican leaders were well aware they would need near-unanimous support from the GOP delegation to push this monstrosity over the finish line.
And they got it, except for one hold-out – Thomas Harold Massie.
Massie explained on X that he opposed the CR because it retains the sort of waste, fraud. and abuse percolating within government. Lawmakers were told they would address spending issues this go-round. It didn’t happen.
The measure passed. But Massie’s no vote proved enough to set off the president’s hair-trigger temper.
“Congressman Thomas Massie, of beautiful Kentucky, is an automatic “NO” vote on just about everything, despite the fact that he has always voted for Continuing Resolutions in the past,” Trump wrote on his website, Truth Social. “HE SHOULD BE PRIMARIED, and I will lead the charge against him. He’s just another GRANDSTANDER, who’s too much trouble, and not worth the fight. He reminds me of Liz Chaney before her historic, record breaking fall (loss!). The people of Kentucky won’t stand for it, just watch. DO I HAVE ANY TAKERS???”
If the threat of a well-funded primary challenge supported by Trump and his minions put a scare in Massie, he’s doing a pretty good job of holding himself together. Chris LaCivita, a widely-acknowledged jerk who served as Trump’s co-campaign manager last year, started the primary opposition talk on X last week, posting the message “Tick tock Tommie.”
“Someone thinks they can control my voting card by threatening my re-election. Guess what? Doesn’t work on me,” Massie wrote in response. “Three times I’ve had a challenger who tried to be more MAGA than me. None busted 25% because my constituents prefer transparency and principles over blind allegiance.”
This is as good a time as any to note that Thomas Massie is, well, an oddball. He zigs when everyone else and their brother zags. He does not play well with others. The word compromise has long been excised from his vocabulary.
The term “maverick” is often used to describe Massie, but it doesn’t go far enough. It often seems like he votes No just for the hell of it, like when in 2014 he opposed awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus – a Republican, by the way – “in recognition of his service to the Nation in promoting excellence, good sportsmanship, and philanthropy.”
He has voted against legislation to make lynching a federal crime.
His greatest hit, however, may have come in 2021 when he opposed the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Improvement Act, offered to stimulate the nation’s COVID-19 ravaged economy, which was figured to fund a replacement for the increasingly dilapidated Brent Spence Bridge across the Ohio River connecting Cincinnati and Covington, the largest city in his district. He got away with that vote thanks to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Louisville) who used his wiles as the then-Senate Republican leader to get the money and bail him out.
Massie has on more than one occasion found himself the lone vote against legislation that would otherwise pass unanimously. He is a libertarian to the extreme, seeking to reduce the size of government sufficiently to push it through the eye of a needle. He wants to kill certain agencies – the Department of Education has been his target for years now – and he can be counted as a No on any appropriations measure.
Massie was the lone Republican to oppose the re-election of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) this year. He has, in fact, made a habit of hounding Republicans like former Rep. John Boehner, of Ohio, and Rep. Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, from the Speaker’s chair and completely out of Congress.
To be fair, he’s not always a refugee in gaga land. Massie has been carrying a torch for years on the nation’s growing debt, which as of Wednesday has reached $36.2 trillion. That’s a tidy sum in anyone’s league and the federal government needs to start chipping away at it, although he obstinately opposes any tax increase to help address the problem.
Oh, and he’s a gun nut. His extremism on the issue tests the borders of sanity. On more than one occasion he has distributed Christmas cards depicting his family brandishing sufficient armaments to invade a small nation like, oh, Greenland maybe. The salutation on the card asks Santa to bring more ammo.
Even foes might feel obliged to grudgingly express respect for his philosophical steadfastness in face of great odds. But Massie’s unrepentant rabidity for guns and the violence they wreak should douse that notion.
The current Trump-Massie conflict doesn’t represent the first time the two men have clashed. In 2020, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Massie demanded that a proposed $2.2 trillion economic rescue package receive a recorded vote, forcing dozens of lawmakers to scurry back to Washington, potentially exposing themselves to the deadly malady.
That did not sit well with Trump, serving his first term in office. The president urged his fellow Republicans to “throw Massie out of the Republican Party,” characterizing him as a “third rate Grandstander.”
The blowback carried no impact. Massie didn’t face any opposition in the 2024 general election and easily survived primaries in 2020 and 2022 by large margins.
Massie endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential primary, although he eventually came around to endorsing Trump after DeSantis dropped out, a circumstance that probably did little to enhance the president-cum-dictator’s affection for the congressman.
“‘Congressman’ Thomas Massie is a GRANDSTANDER, and the Great People of Kentucky are going to be watching a very interesting Primary in the not too distant future!” Trump stated on Truth Social in a post that further confirms his tentative association with the English language.
Republicans, particularly members of Congress, are operating under an intense fear of Trump, who has assumed the sort of unfettered control of the party apparatus like that once held by Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. Trump has sought to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Sooner or later he’s going to get around to changing the name of the Republican Party to the Trump Party.
Many weaklings, like Rep. Andy Barr (R-Lexington) are drooling all over themselves to assure they remain in the great man’s favor, lest he run a candidate against them or refuse to provide an endorsement for someone seeking a Senate seat.
Massie won’t play that game. He supports most of Trump’s initiatives to reduce the size and scope of government. But he won’t dance for the man. And that requires his dismissal.
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Written by Bill Straub, a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame. Cross-posted from the NKY Tribune.
