Congressional drama in Kentucky… and in Israel?

Massie Lost Because He Was Always a Party of One

Yesterday, Kentucky’s Fourth District retired Thomas Massie from Congress. In the hours since the call was made, the loudest voices online have offered a single story: Massie was felled by Jewish money, by pro-Israel donors avenging his criticism of aid to Jerusalem. Massie himself, in a concession speech that managed to be both funny and ugly, joked that it had taken him a while to reach his opponent Ed Gallrein because Gallrein was in Tel Aviv.

That framing is convenient. It is also wrong.

I have known Rep. Massie since his first term. We attended an event together at the Library of Congress, where he was welcomed as one of the new House conservatives, shoulder to shoulder with Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows. As the Freedom Caucus was forming, on paper, he should have been a charter member. He didn’t join. That decision said everything. The boys on the right wanted a confederate. Massie wanted a soapbox.

What followed was not a record of anti-Israel votes. It was a record of votes against almost everything his party supported. He cast one of two Republican votes against Donald Trump’s signature tax bill, citing the deficit. He blocked, by demanding a roll call, the bipartisan COVID relief package in 2020, drawing the president’s first fury. He voted against making lynching a federal hate crime, calling it an expansion of speech-policing. He voted against military action in Iran and Venezuela. He voted against foreign aid to Egypt, to Syria, to Ukraine, and yes, to Israel, because he votes against foreign aid as a category. He partnered with the progressive Democrat Ro Khanna to force release of the Epstein files over the wishes of his own White House. In his very first full-term vote, he voted against John Boehner for Speaker and backed Justin Amash, the libertarian who would later leave the party altogether. Amash is the precedent. Massie is the type.

This is not a portrait of a man with a particular grudge against the Jewish state. It is a portrait of a man with a particular grudge against the institution he was sent to serve.

Speaker Mike Johnson could not count on Thomas Massie’s vote. More than that, he had learned to expect Massie’s NO on the appropriations needed to keep the government open, on the tax bill, on the foreign policy votes the conference needed to hold the line. So did Boehner before him, and Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy. The pattern was visible from year one.

So when Jewish coalitions and a handful of pro-Israel donors spent against Massie this spring, they were joining a much larger coalition that wanted him out. That coalition included the President of the United States, who personally recruited Gallrein and called Massie the worst Republican congressman in the country’s history. It included the National Republican Congressional Committee. It included Andy Barr, Massie’s fellow Kentucky Republican who just won his Senate primary, and who said openly that the average rural MAGA voter had grown weary of Massie’s disloyalty. The party rallied to oust him because he had never really belonged to it. The Israel issue was a symptom and a fundraising hook. It was not the disease.

There is a temptation, when a politician loses, to credit one constituency too generously. Massie’s loss was the Republican Party, top to bottom, finally collecting on a thirteen-year debt of frustration. Pro-Israel voters were part of that party. They were not its engine. Massie can blame Tel Aviv all he wants. The receipts say his own conference paid the bill.

What concerns me now is what comes next, and this is where our community and our allies should pay close attention. Massie is fifty-five. He has a national following, a libertarian network running from Rand Paul to the deep corners of the very-online right, and a fresh martyrdom narrative he is already monetizing. He has been freed from the discipline of caucus politics, freed from the appropriations process, freed from the calculations that kept his rhetoric inside guardrails for fourteen years. The chants of “2028” at his concession party were not a joke he discouraged.

We have seen this archetype before. The MIT-trained Kentucky engineer with the homemade debt-clock pin, the family-rifle Christmas card, and the principled refusal to call a federal lynching law anything other than government overreach, draws from the same Appalachian-libertarian wellspring as Vice President Vance, even if one man rose by joining the party and the other has just been expelled by it. The libertarianism, the suspicion of foreign entanglement, the rural-grievance vocabulary, the willingness to flirt with the very-online ethnonationalist right when the institutional right turns its back: these are the same currents, drawing from the same well, and they are gaining audience with a public that has lost patience with foreign commitments and institutional gatekeepers alike.

That is what we should watch. Not whether Massie blames Jewish money for his defeat, though he will. The question is which audience finds him compelling once there is no committee chair to answer to, no leadership whip to displease, no donor he is courting other than the one paying for the podcast. Libertarianism taken to its extreme has, historically, a door at the back of the room. It does not always stay closed.

The Republican Party threw Thomas Massie out of the building. The question is which door he walks through next, and how many of our neighbors he persuades to follow him through it.