For ten years, every time Justin Amash voted on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, he went online and told his constituents how he had voted and why. He did it for every vote. Of the first 5,374 roll calls of his time in Congress, he missed exactly one. When it happened, in 2017, he apologized publicly, and by one account he teared up.
He has said the habit began almost by accident, as a way to use idle time on the House floor. It became the thing he was known for: a member of Congress who believed he owed people an explanation.
Before Congress, he was a teenager from Kentwood who went to the MIFA State Finals in Sales.
Sales, twice
Amash qualified for State in Sales as a Grand Rapids Christian sophomore in 1996 and again as a junior in 1997, when he reached the semifinal round in Class A. Sales asks a student to pitch a real product to a room of strangers.
It ran in the family. He has two brothers, John and Jeff, and our State Finals books show a John Amash of Grand Rapids Christian in Sales in 1992 and a Jeff Amash in Informative in 1997.
A 2010 Grand Rapids Press profile recalls that he was strong in math and art, that he parodied an advice column in the school paper, that he graduated in 1998 as valedictorian, as his older brother had before him. He told a group of high school students in 2025 that his classmates voted him most likely to take over the world.
He once did make a sales call on all of Congress. Early in his time in Washington he asked every one of his 434 colleagues for a meeting in their office so that he could pitch them on a balanced budget amendment. More than a hundred said yes.
Seventeen dollars
His father, Attallah Amash, came to the United States in 1956 as a teenage Palestinian refugee, sponsored by a pastor in Muskegon. The family has said they arrived with seventeen dollars and spent it on bread and tomatoes. He built a hardware wholesale business in West Michigan that grew into Michigan Industrial Tools. Justin’s mother, Mimi, came from Damascus. The three brothers all earned law degrees at the University of Michigan and all went into the family company.
At Grand Rapids Christian he also met a classmate named Kara Day. The story he tells is that he promised himself he would ask her out if she happened to walk past his locker. She did. Their first date was dinner and miniature golf. They are married and have three children.
Lansing and Washington
He studied economics at Michigan, graduating in 2002, and finished law school there in 2005. After a year at a Grand Rapids law firm and a stint in the family business, he won a seat in the Michigan House in 2008, where he began posting his vote explanations. In 2010, at thirty, he was elected to Congress from Grand Rapids, and Time put him on its list of forty leaders under forty.
He served five terms. He founded and chaired the House Liberty Caucus, and in 2013 an amendment he wrote to limit the government’s bulk collection of phone records drew 205 votes, just short of a majority, with support from members of both parties. He was elected as a Republican, became an independent in 2019, and in 2020 became the first member of Congress to belong to the Libertarian Party. He did not run for re-election that year. In 2024 he also sought Michigan’s Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate.
He now lives near Grand Rapids and writes about Congress and the Constitution. Since 2025 he has served on the advisory council of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech organization. Speaking to those high school students last year, he told them that he first got interested in politics at their age, and that failing at things is fine.
Forensics does not care what a student goes on to argue. It teaches them to stand up, make the case and take the questions. Amash spent a decade in Washington doing exactly that, several thousand times.
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
