You ready?

I was born ready.

Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. This is David Fritch with Sarah Isker and I'm going to correct a mistake that I've been making in recent podcasts, which is I've been asking y'all to rate our podcast to continue to rate it on Apple Podcasts and to continue to subscribe.

I've been asking you to do that at the very end and not everyone hangs in for the last hour. It's still important for the full hour, I just say it's still important for you to subscribe. It's still important for you to give us a good rating on Apple Podcasts, so we would really appreciate it if you do it. It helps us out a great deal.

This is a very special podcast, not a very special podcast in the sense of like a very special family ties or a very special different strokes, but a very special because this is the first time in advisory opinion history that we have an active, is it precise to say presidential candidate or someone who is not.

It is not someone who is formed an exploratory committee to determine whether or not he's going to be a presidential candidate.

The federal election commission, thanks you for your precision.

Yes, as always, we like to be precise. So we're going to begin today with an interview with Justin Amash, who gave us a half hour of his time earlier today.

We'll start with that. I'm also going to note whose guest he is. And then we're going to follow up with an extended discussion of this horrible case that is dominating the media rightfully so out of Brunswick, Georgia, the Amad Arbery case.

I wrote about it today. Sarah's been looking into this in detail. We're going to talk about the legal and cultural aspects of that.

And also, before we go on, we're going to put a pin in the fact that the DOJ just moments before we began recording this podcast decided to drop its case against Michael Flynn.

So we're going to put a pin in Flynn. We're going to talk about that probably on Monday after we've had a chance to review the DOJ filings. We don't want to do some sort of spontaneous hot take.

So without further ado, let's start with Congressman Justin Amash.

So that we have Congressman Justin Amash, who has just made a bit of history and Congressman you crack can crack me if I'm wrong. Are you now the officially the first libertarian member of the libertarian party who's also a member of the United States Congress?

That's what I'm told. So I'll take people's work for it.

I think that's correct. You've also just formed an exploratory committee to run for president of the United States seeking the libertarian party nomination and creating a splash and a furious amount of sniping back and forth left and right as to who you're helping who you're hurting.

So what kind of chance do you have? And I just want to begin by noting that you had a tweet that warmed my nerd heart earlier today and that was after Brad Parscale compared the Trump campaign to the death star.

You tweeted a gif of Luke Skywalker blowing the death star up which that is exactly the way to get the coveted David French endorsement highly coveted.

My question is as you launch this effort do you see do you think that this is you are Luke Skywalker or is this the charge of the light brigade where it's a doomed charge with cannons to the right of you and cannons to the left of you.

I think this is a winning battle. I don't view it as some kind of kamikaze attack or anything like that. I'm running because I believe I can win and I wouldn't have gotten into this race if I didn't think there was a path to victory.

I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it and as part of that of course you think about the other candidates who are in the race and I think you have two very weak candidates candidates that aren't really inspiring and in some sense are just the default candidates of the party.

I know that he gets high marks in the Republican party but I think that's largely because things are so polarized right now and people often contrast him to the alternative which they view as socialism or Democrats or Nancy Pelosi or whatever it might be.

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