This is The Reason interview with Nick Gillespie. Thanks for listening. Today's episode is sponsored by Donors Trust, the tax-friendly way to preserve your charitable giving. More on them later in the show.

Just 15% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it?

Those are just two of the questions I asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan,

who's currently exploring a Senate run. Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus,

but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government.

After voting to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent,

and joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only

libertarian to serve in Congress.

We talked about the 2024 presidential race and the country's political and cultural polarization

that seems to be growing with every passing day.

We also talked about how his parents' experiences as a Christian

refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship,

and American exceptionalism. This Q&A took place on the final day of LibertyCon, the annual

event for Students for Liberty that was held recently in

Washington, D.C. Here is the reason interview with Justin Amash. All right. Thank you,

everybody, for coming out, and even coming out for Justin Amash. But let's give it up to him

one more time, please. So the topic of this talk, and we're going to veer away from that, but let's start

with why is Congress broken and how do we fix that?

And let's give you a couple minutes on that.

All right, well, we could take up the whole 30 minutes talking about that if we wanted to.

We don't know exactly how Congress got to where it is, but today it is highly centralized,

where a few people at the top control everything. And that has a lot of negative consequences for

...