James' World 2

Massie, who is known for his outspoken libertarian views, has survived primary challenges before and told Axios, which reported on the effort to oust him, that “any serious person considering running should spend money on an independent poll before letting swampy consultants take them for an embarrassing ride.”

Who is Thomas Massie?

Massie, 54, was born in West Virginia and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from MIT in the 1990s before turning to local politics in 2010, when he ran and won the race for Judge Executive of Lewis County, Ky., amid the Tea Party wave.

In 2012, after then-Rep. Geoff Davis announced his retirement in Kentucky’s deep-red 4th congressional district, Massie, who described himself as a “constitutional conservative,” won the Republican primary in a landslide. When Davis resigned early, Massie won the same-day special election and general election to succeed him, taking office two months earlier than his fellow freshmen representatives elected in 2012.

One of Massie’s first moves was to vote in January 2013 against party leader John Boehner for Speaker, opting instead to vote for fellow libertarian Justin Amash. (Boehner narrowly won the speakership but would go on to resign in 2015. Amash would go on to not run for reelection in 2020 and temporarily leave the Republican Party after earning Trump’s wrath for consistent criticism of the President and supporting his impeachment.)

Since then, Massie has made a name for himself by regularly voting against bills, often breaking with his caucus and sometimes siding with Democrats. In 2013, Politico dubbed him “Mr. No.”

In 2016, Massie said he would vote for Trump but do everything he could to “rein him in” if he acts unconstitutionally. In 2017, Massie tried to explain how the same movement that propelled him into office could also propel someone like Trump, telling the Washington Examiner: “All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a b—– in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class.”

During Trump’s first term, Massie was among a small group of Republicans who joined Democrats in trying to override Trump’s veto of legislation that would block his national emergency declaration at the border in 2019. That same year, he was the sole Republican to vote against a resolution opposing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement targeting Israel, and he was the sole no-vote across both parties on the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.