Everybody’s mad at Thomas Massie. Again. The beef this time is the Kentucky congressman’s stubborn refusal to back Mike Johnson as House Speaker, but there have been plenty enough over the years to make the most libertarian-minded member of the House a household name, for better or worse depending on one’s political perspective.

Massie, a former businessman and an MIT graduate, has served in Congress since 2013, but he didn’t really make his mark until President Donald Trump assumed office four years later. It’s one thing to be a ‘contrarian’ when Democrats are running the show and nearly everyone in your party is voting ‘no’ right along with you. It’s quite another to repeatedly defy the popular leader of your own party. And defy Trump he did, time after time. (But in a good way, from the right, not from the left like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger.)

During the 2019 government shutdown, Massie consistently voted against bills that would have reopened the federal government. He was then one of only seven to vote against granting back pay to federal workers after the shutdown. That same year, he even

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