This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 12th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

When Justin Amage departed from the Republican Party last week, one of the biggest costs, according to the American conservative editor Jim Antel, is the continued fracturing of the anti-war right.

We spoke earlier this week.

Justin Amash took the 4th of July, Independence Day, the holiday in order to make an announcement

that he was departing from the Republican Party.

And I think it's worth sort of characterizing

the events that led up to this.

He has been for a long time, not treated particularly well by his fellow Republicans.

That's definitely true and in many cases the mistreatment has stemmed from his

desire to hold Republicans to their stated values, to the commitments

that they've made in their campaigns and in their platforms and, you know, the promises

of smaller government balanced budgets

uh... sustainable long-term debt uh... those are things Republicans have

campaigned on

uh... you know emash initially uh initially was starting to get tossed off of committees before, really even

Paul Ryan was speaker when he was starting to say that some of the budgets, the Ryan budgets were not necessarily as fiscally responsible as was advertised and then those committee votes

led to him

losing some some key assignments.

So this is not a new thing that attempting to hold Republicans

to their supposed standards of constitutionalism and fiscal restraint has led to bad things

politically for the congressman and clearly this was building up for quite some time.

So with specific respect to members of Congress not sort of playing ball, this should be expected.

...