George Will

At the pandemic’s beginning, members of Congress dispersed, and both parties’ leaders in the House of Representatives agreed, as rules permit, to pass the Cares Act without a quorum or roll call if no one objected. Thomas Massie objected to spending $2.1 trillion that way.

Having forced Congress to reconvene, the Kentucky Republican drove all night to get to the Capitol, where the House was united in bipartisan fury against him. To spite him, House leaders passed the bill on a voice vote. Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Massie a “dangerous nuisance.” He would, he says, have been offended if she had not appended the adjective, which affirmed him as consequential.

Now in his seventh term, the libertarian does not always play well with others. He usually thinks like – but is too much an individualist to be a member of – the obstreperous Freedom Caucus. Prickly independence comes naturally to someone from a county south of the Mason-Dixon Line that has a monument to Union Civil War soldiers. One-hundred and seven of them from the county died for the Union.

His grandmother, sharp as a tack at 96, is the granddaughter of a Union soldier. She vetted at Sunday dinners all those who wanted to become spouses of her seven children. None are married to secessionists, a.k.a. Democrats.

Massie, 52, lives on his farm in an off-the grid, solar-powered timber house he built using pegs, not nails. He and his wife, Rhonda, his high school sweetheart, graduated from MIT, where he earned two engineering degrees (electrical and mechanical); while students, they started a technology business. Massie made his first primitive robot in seventh grade.

He became motivated by a thought he heard from a speaker at MIT (New Hampshire’s governor at the time, John H. Sununu, a former professor of mechanical engineering): Politics needs more engineers and fewer lawyers. Engineers gather facts to reach solutions; lawyers have preferences and gather facts to support them. “The banana peel I slipped on to get into government,” he says, “was writing letters to the editor.”

Massie has more pointed opinions than a porcupine has quills. In his first political office — essentially, mayor of his county — he stopped a drive to impose zoning, which he considered pointless government interference. Zoning would, he says, supposedly have protected “the cul-de-sacs from the smokestacks,” and his rural county had none of either.

In Congress, he hit the ground running to the right: His first significant House vote, in 2013, supported Republican conservatives’ first attempt to topple Republican Speaker John A. Boehner. In 2015, the successful resolution “declaring the office of speaker . . . vacant” bristled with complaints, many of them festering eight years later: The speaker “has endeavored to consolidate power and centralize decisionmaking”; “has, through inaction, caused the power of Congress to atrophy”; has limited “meaningful amendments” and floor debates, etc.

Massie’s less-than-utopian wish list begins with the often-promised but unseen-for-many-years “regular order.” All bills come from the committees of jurisdiction. And 12 appropriations bills — never again omnibus monstrosities — acted on by the Oct. 1 beginning of the fiscal year. Under the debt ceiling agreement, tardiness triggers a continuing resolution with spending cuts across the board by 1 percent from the previous year.

Massie is bemused that some of his Republican colleagues — none more devoted than he is to shrinking government — are muttering about removing Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Massie says this is like seeking a divorce five months after the honeymoon because the meatloaf is burned.

But after, say, 10 months? Stay tuned.

Massie expects to seek “at least one more term,” even though he considers Congress “a vestigial organ of the Republic” and a mere “ombudsman” for nagging the executive branch, which he says probably heats its buildings by burning letters of grievance sent by legislators on behalf of constituents pestered by bureaucrats.

He intends to continue trying to energize the legislature. Perhaps he became so implacable growing up (“As the twig is bent so grows the tree”) in a community where the inscription on the statue of the Union soldier reads: “The war for the Union was right, everlastingly right, and the war against the Union was wrong, forever wrong.”

The engineer from MIT spent one weekend over the winter inventing, and writing a thousand lines of code for, what is pinned to his suit jacket: About three inches long and as wide as a cigar, its tiny red digital numbers whir rapidly in real time as the national debt increases. The parliamentarian says Massie can wear it in the House chamber but not when speaking there. Lest . . . what?