Justin Amash?
Amash - just became my rep this election cycle. Walberg was redistricted.
He's a relatively recent congressman from Grand Rapids, Mich., where I used to live. He's a firebrand but I'm afraid he's been setting the wrong fires.
I've been out of Michigan for more than a dozen years (though I have many ties there), but I now have a new reason to be interested. My congresswoman in Missouri, Rep. Vicky Hartzler, was appointed to one of the positions from which Amash and others was removed on the House Budget Committee. I have problems with Hartzler, but on social issues she is a rock-solid conservative and led the fight in Missouri against homosexual marriage.
I want to withhold judgment on the details of Rep. Amash because I haven't followed his career closely, but on the broad picture, I think it's fairly clear he does not represent the socially conservative voters of Michigan's Bible Belt.
He's not the first case of that, unfortunately. A congressional district as socially conservative as those found in West Michigan, if it were in South Carolina or Mississippi or Texas, would be sending firebrand right-wingers to Congress on a crusade to kill liberal programs and godless wickedness along with them.
That simply has not been the case in West Michigan despite demographics which are clearly ripe for a right-wing conservative Christian candidate, as long as his name is VanderSomething to attract Dutch voters. Conservative Christians do get elected to local offices and the state legislature in West Michigan, but for some reason that doesn't get translated into success in Congressional races.
Some of that isn't too surprising, historically — this is Jerry Ford's old district, after all.
Ford made a career out of being a moderate and successfully keeping radical conservatives under control by giving them some of what they wanted, running things by consensus rather than based on core ideological principle. I know from experience how Ford worked hard to keep the Dutch business leaders happy, knowing they'd keep their Christian Reformed and Reformed Church in America pastors under control, and thereby prevent too many problems coming out of the pews. Ford faced one serious revolt over Christian education, and he ended up co-opting the leaders of the revolt by getting them involved in mainstream Republican Party politics.
That was a really smart move on Ford's part, and it was typical of how he operated, knowing that conservatives get really angry but once the anger subsides, they generally don't have the staying power to mount a successful long-term campaign to get rid of someone.
More recently, the Dutch Reformed have actually been operating the levers of power rather than being co-opted by mainstream Republican leaders. The problem has been that the wrong Dutch people were pulling the levers, people who no longer represented the core conservative Christian commitments of their heritage.
Here are two examples.
Rep. Amash’s predecessor, Rep. Vern Ehlers, was a member of one of the most liberal congregations in the Christian Reformed Church. He was a bookish former college science professor, not a fighter for conservative causes. His predecessor, Rep. Paul Henry, was the son of noted evangelical leader Carl F.H. Henry, and a member of a powerful and (at the time) fairly conservative downtown Christian Reformed congregation. Personally I liked Rep. Henry and didn't have a problem with him, but he was regarded as simply “too nice” by a lot of hard-core conservatives.
Pay attention, guys. This is a case study in how conservatives get co-opted by mainstream Republican elements. My guess is that if the national GOP gets sick and tired of Amash, they'll find a reasonably compliant pro-life conservative Christian candidate to run in the primary against Amash. The core demographics of his district do not support Amash’s positions and that makes him vulnerable.