By Sean Dempsey | 06/03/2026
There is, in the modern Republic, no more reliable method of discovering an honest man than observing how much money is required to destroy him. The obedient congressman, that cheerful little instrument of appropriations, authorizations, emergency supplementals, continuing resolutions, foreign aid packages, surveillance renewals, debt-ceiling evasions, and all the other perfumed instruments by which Washington robs posterity while congratulating itself for courage, is rarely troubled. He is given committee assignments, leadership favor, donor receptions, television hits, and perhaps, if he has shown sufficient talent for contradicting his own campaign literature, a reputation for seriousness.
But let a man ask a forbidden question… let him rise in the House of Representatives and inquire whether Congress has constitutional authority to do what it is doing… and suddenly the full machinery of respectability begins to tremble. Let him ask not once, but every time, “Is this constitutional?” Let him further ask, “Who pays?” Let him then vote no when the answer is “your grandchildren,” and one will see Washington’s true religion revealed. It is not democracy. It is not conservatism. It is not even party loyalty. It is expenditure.
Thomas Massie’s great offense was consistency. His still greater offense was that he applied his principles to both parties. During the Biden years, he did not merely oppose Democrats when opposition was fashionable; he opposed the whole theory of government by emergency. According to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of the 117th Congress, Massie voted with President Biden’s stated position only 1.8 percent of the time, tying him with Chip Roy as the House member least likely to side with Biden. This was not the record of a Republican secretly helping Democrats, despite what campaign consultants later attempted to sell to inattentive voters. It was the record of a man who opposed Biden’s agenda with mathematical regularity.
Yet the interesting feature of Massie is not that he opposed Biden. That is what Republicans are paid to do, and they perform the theatrical portion of the obligation with sufficient vigor. The interesting feature is that he also opposed Republicans when they behaved like Democrats with better lapel pins. He voted no on spending bills when Democrats wrote them, and no again when Republicans discovered, upon reacquiring power, that trillion-dollar deficits were in fact a species of patriotism. He opposed COVID spending under Trump, Biden-era expansion, Ukraine aid, Israel aid, warrantless surveillance, and finally Trump’s own One Big Beautiful Bill, that immense fiscal pudding into which every faction dipped its spoon while assuring the public it was a diet.
The Congressional Budget Office later estimated that the One Big Beautiful Bill would increase deficits by $3.4 trillion over the 2025-2034 period. The House passed it by the narrowest political hair, 218-214, with only two Republicans voting no: Thomas Massie and Brian Fitzpatrick. Massie called it what it was: a “debt bomb ticking.” In a city where arithmetic is treated as sedition, this was received as treason.
Massie’s fiscal conservatism was not an ornament. It was not a campaign prop brought out for Republican primaries and then returned to storage. He wore a national debt clock pin not as jewelry but as accusation. He warned that interest alone would soon become a national catastrophe. He argued that Congress could use “fantasy math,” but bond investors would not be so easily amused. This is the difference between a politician and a statesman: the politician asks whether a bill can pass; the statesman asks whether the country can survive it or not.
His voting record reflected the same instinct across issue after issue. Heritage Action gave him a 96 percent session score in the 117th Congress and an 83 percent lifetime score. Club for Growth’s 2024 scorecard counted him among the House Republicans with a perfect score that year. These are not measures of moderation, nor of liberalism, nor of secret Democratic sympathy. They are measures of a man who spent his career trying to make the federal government smaller, poorer, weaker, less arrogant, and less able to interfere in the lives of Americans.
On regulation, he supported the REINS Act, which would require congressional approval for major federal regulations. “Excessive regulation stifles economic growth,” he said, and raises consumer prices. This was not glamorous work. It did not produce viral applause. But it went to the root of the constitutional disease: Congress had delegated its lawmaking power to unelected agencies and then pretended surprise when the administrative state grew into a fourth branch of government. Massie’s answer was simple: if a regulation has the force of law, Congress should have to own it.
On food freedom, Massie pushed the PRIME Act with Democrat Chellie Pingree, a bill designed to let states permit intrastate distribution of custom-slaughtered meat. To the Washington mind this is a small matter. To the citizen, it is everything. A farmer should not need to beg a distant bureaucracy for permission to feed his neighbors. A family should not be treated as a criminal conspiracy because it prefers local meat, raw milk, or independent agriculture to the industrial cartel blessed by federal regulators. Massie’s America First philosophy was not confined to speeches about borders and wars. It extended to the farm, the kitchen, the family, the local market, the small producer, and the right of Americans to live without federal supervision in every ordinary act of existence.
On surveillance, Massie likewise proved that his constitutionalism was not decorative. He supported efforts to end warrantless searches of Americans’ information and opposed clean reauthorizations of FISA Section 702 without meaningful warrant protections. Here again one saw the usual Washington arrangement: officials who spoke reverently of liberty while quietly preserving the machinery to spy on citizens without ordinary constitutional safeguards. Massie’s position was not complicated. The Fourth Amendment exists. Warrants matter. The government does not become trustworthy merely because it says “national security” in a grave voice.
But foreign policy is where Massie most thoroughly exposed the fraudulence of modern America First rhetoric. The phrase “America First” once meant something plain enough for a child to understand. It meant that American lives, American wealth, American borders, American industry, American workers, American infrastructure, American constitutional government, and American peace should take precedence over the ambitions of foreign capitals and the profit calculations of defense contractors. It meant that the United States should not exhaust itself policing the planet while its own people were told to accept decline as maturity.
Massie believed this before it was fashionable, during the years it was fashionable, and after fashion abandoned it.
In April 2024, the House voted on a massive foreign aid package involving Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act passed 311-112. Massie voted no. The Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act passed 366-58. Massie voted no again. He also opposed earlier Ukraine aid measures, including a September 2023 Ukraine security assistance bill. These were not easy votes for a Republican. They were not applause-line votes. They invited attack ads, donor fury, cable-news scolding, and the usual accusation that any refusal to fund foreign governments is proof of moral deformity.
Yet Massie’s question remained magnificent in its simplicity: why is a nation $39.2 trillion in debt borrowing money to send abroad while its own people are told there is no money for them?
Washington had no answer. It never has answers, only vapid stares and blood-soaked whims.
The same constitutional logic governed his stance on war powers. In June 2025, amid rising tensions involving Iran, Massie joined Ro Khanna in introducing a War Powers Resolution to prohibit unauthorized U.S. hostilities against Iran. Massie’s statement was unmistakable:
“Congress has the sole power to declare war against Iran,” and “the ongoing war between Israel and Iran is not our war.”
There, in two sentences, was the whole lost architecture of the American constitutional order. Congress declares war. The president does not improvise it. Foreign conflicts are not automatically American conflicts. An ally’s war is not, by magic, our war. The Constitution does not contain an Israel exception, a Ukraine exception, a NATO exception, or a think-tank exception.
This was precisely the America First foreign policy Donald Trump had campaigned on when he promised no new wars. Massie supported that promise. Millions did. But the test of a promise is not whether it sounds good before power is acquired; the test is whether it survives power. When the movement drifted back toward intervention, Massie did not drift with it. When foreign policy hawks discovered new reasons for old habits, he did not salute. When money flowed and pressure mounted, he remained where he had been: Congress must authorize war, America should not fund the world, and the American people are not draft animals for the foreign-policy class.
Then came Epstein…
If foreign aid revealed the hollowness of America First spending priorities, the Epstein files revealed the hollowness of Washington’s alleged love of transparency. For years, Americans across the political spectrum had been told to wait, to trust, to accept redactions, to endure delays, to believe that the same institutions that failed to fully expose Epstein’s network could be trusted to decide what the public deserved to know. Massie refused. In 2025 he joined Ro Khanna to introduce the Epstein Files Transparency Act and pursued a discharge petition to force a House vote if leadership would not act.
The bill eventually passed the House 427-1 after Massie gathered the 218 signatures needed to force consideration. This was not a speech. It was not a fundraising email. It was not symbolic indignation. It was legislative combat. Massie found the mechanism, built the coalition, endured the pressure, and forced the vote. He said the overwhelming House vote was “a major victory” for Epstein’s survivors and for transparency. In another public defense of the effort, he warned that justice could not be avoided merely to spare powerful men embarrassment.
Observe the absurdity. A Republican congressman helped force near-unanimous transparency on one of the most notorious criminal scandals in modern American life, and for this he was treated by his own party’s leadership as a problem. Why? Because transparency is beloved in Washington only until it threatens someone important. Accountability is sacred until it acquires names. Then, quite suddenly, prudence is discovered.
The attacks followed. Trump labeled Massie a RINO, an insult that in this case revealed more about the accuser’s movement than the accused. For what, exactly, had Massie changed? Had he become pro-spending? No. Pro-war? No. Pro-surveillance? No. Pro-foreign aid? No. Pro-bureaucracy? No. Had he abandoned the Constitution? No. His crime was not transformation but immobility. He stood still while the party moved around him, then was denounced for being in the wrong place.
By 2026, the punishment campaign had become historic. Reports described Massie’s primary against Trump-backed Ed Gallrein as the most expensive U.S. House primary in history, with more than $32 million in ad spending. Reuters reported that Gallrein defeated Massie 54.9 percent to 45.1 percent after heavy financial backing from pro-Israel groups and Trump-aligned PACs. Al Jazeera similarly reported that Gallrein was backed by Trump’s endorsement and millions from pro-Trump and pro-Israel political groups. The Guardian later noted Massie’s claim that outside money, including PACs linked to AIPAC, played a major role in the race.
Thus Washington delivered its lesson. If it cannot buy the vote, it will buy the seat. If a man cannot be persuaded to support the debt, the wars, the aid packages, the secrecy, the surveillance, and the sacred machinery of permanent government, then perhaps enough money can persuade his constituents to remove him.
This is not merely the story of Thomas Massie. It is the story of what became of the America First movement after power touched it. The movement began with a healthy suspicion of empire, debt, globalism, open-ended security guarantees, and ruling-class contempt for ordinary Americans. Massie embodied that suspicion. But movements are easily captured. Slogans are cheap real estate. Soon America First could be made to mean nearly anything, including the same foreign commitments, the same deficits, the same executive war-making, the same surveillance powers, and the same obedience to donor-class priorities that it once opposed.
Massie’s tragedy was that he believed the words.
He believed “no new wars” actually meant no new wars. He believed “drain the swamp” meant exposing secrets, not protecting them. He believed “America First” meant asking why American treasure was being shipped abroad while Americans drowned in debt. He believed “constitutional conservative” meant voting against unconstitutional power, even when a Republican president wanted it. He believed “limited government” meant less government, not merely differently branded government.
For this he was excommunicated.
But excommunication is not refutation. A man may be driven from office and still be proven right. Indeed, in Washington, being driven from office may be the first evidence that one was right about something important. Massie’s record over the last seven years reads like a ledger of forbidden truths: Biden’s agenda was an expansion of federal power; Republican spending was still spending; foreign aid was still borrowed money; war still required Congress; surveillance still required the Fourth Amendment; regulations still needed accountability; Epstein still required sunlight; and America First still required putting America first.
The party did not reject Massie because he abandoned his principles. It rejected him because he kept them.
That is why the RINO charge rings so hollow. If Republicanism means limited government, constitutional fidelity, fiscal restraint, skepticism of foreign entanglements, protection of civil liberties, and distrust of centralized power, then Massie was not the Republican in name only. He was one of the few Republicans left practicing the old religion. It was the party that changed its liturgy.
History may not be gentle with Thomas Massie’s critics. It may ask why, in an age of $36 trillion debt, they punished one of the few men warning about bankruptcy. It may ask why, after decades of military failure, they punished one of the few men demanding congressional war powers. It may ask why, after years of institutional distrust, they punished one of the few men forcing transparency on Epstein. It may ask why, after promising America First, they spent millions to defeat a congressman who had actually voted that way.
And perhaps history will ask the cruelest question of all: what kind of movement destroys the man who most faithfully believed its promises?
Thomas Massie was not perfect. No politician is. But he possessed a quality so rare in Washington that it appeared almost indecent: he meant what he said. He was sent to Congress and behaved as though the oath mattered. He read bills. He counted costs. He asked where the Constitution authorized the act. He voted no when no was required. He did not confuse loyalty to a president with loyalty to the Republic. He did not confuse foreign interests with American interests. He did not confuse party victory with national salvation.
That is why they hated him.
And that is why he matters to so many people. People who believe(d) that the Constitution still meant something in Washington DC. But no more.
Thomas Massie may have lost a primary. But the indictment he leaves behind is larger than one district, one party, or one president. It is an indictment of a Congress that spends without shame, wars without declaration, surveils without warrants, regulates without accountability, hides without embarrassment, and then calls the honest man a traitor for objecting.
If America First is to mean anything more than a hat, a chant, or a fundraising slogan, then it must mean what Massie insisted it meant: America’s Constitution first, America’s people first, America’s treasury first, America’s peace first, and America’s truth first.
By that standard, Thomas Massie was not the man who left the America First movement.
Rather, he was the last man in Washington still standing for America.
References:
[1] FiveThirtyEight/ABC News reported Biden-position voting data; Massie was among the House members least likely to vote with Biden. (ABC News)
[2] CBO estimated H.R. 1 would increase deficits by $3.4 trillion from 2025–2034. (Congressional Budget Office)
[3] House Clerk roll call: One Big Beautiful Bill passed 218–214. (House Clerk)
[4] Massie’s “debt bomb ticking” quote was reported by Fox News and others. (Fox News)
[5] Massie’s fiscal warnings on the BBB were reported in contemporaneous coverage. (The New Republic)
[6] Heritage Action listed Massie’s 117th Congress score at 96% and lifetime score at 83%. (Heritage Action)
[7] NOTUS reported Club for Growth’s 2024 scorecard included Massie among House Republicans with perfect scores. (NOTUS)
[8] Massie’s REINS Act statement appears in his official release. (Massie House)
[9] Massie and Pingree’s PRIME Act release describes the bill’s food-freedom purpose. (Massie House)
[10] Massie’s warrantless-surveillance position appears in his legislative history and public statements. (Massie House)
[11] House Clerk roll call: Ukraine Security Supplemental passed 311–112. (House Clerk)
[12] House Clerk roll call: Israel Security Supplemental passed 366–58. (House Clerk)
[13] Vote Smart recorded Massie’s no vote on the 2023 Ukraine security assistance bill. (Vote Smart)
[14] Massie’s Iran War Powers Resolution statement is from his official House release. (Massie House)
[15] Massie and Khanna introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act and threatened a discharge petition. (Massie House)
[16] Massie’s office reported the EFTA passed 427–1 after the 218-signature discharge petition. (Massie House)
[17] Same official release quoted Massie calling the vote a victory for survivors and transparency. (Massie House)
[18] ABC/Khanna page quoted Massie on not avoiding justice to avoid embarrassing powerful men. (Congressman Ro Khanna)
[19] Washington Post and Axios described the Massie primary as the most expensive House primary, with more than $32 million in spending. (The Washington Post)
[20] Reuters reported Gallrein defeated Massie 54.9% to 45.1% with heavy backing from pro-Israel groups and Trump-aligned PACs. (Reuters)
[21] Al Jazeera reported Gallrein was backed by Trump and millions from pro-Trump and pro-Israel groups. (Al Jazeera)
[22] The Guardian reported Massie’s post-loss claim about outside money and PACs linked to AIPAC. (The Guardian)
