Massie relishes role of Washington's 'Mr No,' as Kentuckians continue to reelect him in big numbers

Maverick Massie or 'Mr. No?'

There’s nobody quite like Republican Congressman Thomas Massie. His no-nonsense libertarian flair has made him a Kentucky favorite since first getting elected to Congress 2012. 

He's since won reelection by taking as much as 99% of the vote. But his popularity in Washington, D.C., particularly among Washington lawmakers, is decidedly less so – considering he frequently votes in opposition to fellow House Republicans, who with the narrowest of a majority cannot afford detractors. 

And he frequently says the quiet part out loud.

“I think the uni-party here is on the same path they were on before President Trump was elected,” Massie said when recently interviewed by Full Measure on Capitol Hill. 

We talked about his fellow House Republicans, their leader Mike Johnson, the Trump agenda, and The Swamp.

“And I think we may be on a collision course, like I think there's three cars coming together at an intersection and they don't realize they’re gonna hit,” Massie continues. 

“And one of them is Congress with [Republican House Speaker] Mike Johnson driving, is in one of these cars. Trump is obviously one of these cars. Maybe he's the train. And then there's another car, which is DOGE. And I don't think Elon Musk is gonna suffer these fools once he finds out how foolish they are or duplicitous they are. You don't land rockets backwards, you don't get cars to drive themselves on the interstate by ignoring the fools that you're working with.”

I asked in response: “What fools are you referring to?"

“Mike Johnson,” replies Massie. “He’s the leader of the fools … anybody following him now as a fool as well.”

A fiscal hawk and MIT-educated engineer, Massie’s record in Congress is a highlight reel of lone dissent. He calls the proposed Republican budget, which failed Friday in the House Budget Committee, “a suicide pact to spend us into oblivion.”

In 2020, he infuriated both parties by forcing lawmakers back to Washington, D.C., for an in-person vote by name on a $2.2 trillion Covid relief bill he saw as fiscally reckless. 

The vote even drew the ire of President Trump, who tweeted: "Throw Massie out of the Republican Party!" 

In 2022, he was the only House member to reject a resolution against antisemitism. He argued it threatened free speech. And he’s continued taking solo stances this year.

“I've stood alone three times so far in three months," he says. "I was the only dissenting Republican on making Mike Johnson the speaker. I was the only dissenting Republican on our budget. And I was the lone dissenting Republican on the continuing resolution, which is a cut-copy=paste of Biden's last 15 months in office, which is going to do the same thing for the first nine months of Trump's administration.”

He calls colleagues two-faced on Trump’s government-shrinking agenda – like plans to shut down the US Agency for International Development, or USAID.

"There are Republicans, for instance, that want that USAID money,” Massie says. "I mean there was a surreal moment for me at the State of the Union when Trump talked about cutting all these DOGE things that they had discovered. 

"And my colleagues all stood up and, and cheered. And I'm like, ‘You are the ones who funded all of this. Like DOGE is cutting the things that you all did and now you're applauding.’ And Elon Musk is at odds with a lot of those Republicans who stood up and clapped. But they're playing along with it right now, and they're gonna do sort of a, I would call it Rope a Dope maybe to use a Kentucky boxer analogy here. They're just letting Elon wear himself out.”

For more on this story, watch "Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” Sunday. Attkisson's most recent book is "Follow the $cience: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails."