A lament for the constitutional office of the United States House of Representatives, and for the citizens of Kentucky’s Fourth District who let strangers buy it from them.
I am not here to canonize Thomas Massie. He was not a saint, and I disagree with him on enough policy questions to fill a column of their own. He was something rarer than a saint and more useful to a republic: a Member of Congress who understood that the seat he occupied belonged to the people who lived around him. Not to his donors. Not to his Speaker. Not to his President. He voted his district. He read the bills. When the rest of the chamber would not show up, he stayed and demanded a quorum. Whatever else one thinks of him, he was, in the older and more demanding sense of the word, a representative.
On Tuesday, his district fired him.
It cost a record thirty-two million dollars in advertising to make that happen. Roughly twelve million of that came from the pro-Israel lobby, led by AIPAC, to punish a Kentucky congressman for the votes he cast on aid to a foreign government. Another large share came from the President of the United States and the political apparatus he commands, working to remove a Member of his own party who would not be reliable on the votes the President cared about. On the final day of the campaign, the sitting Secretary of Defense flew into the district to rally against the incumbent congressman — an act federal law has long restricted of executive-branch officials acting in their official capacity, and which an honest reading of the spirit of the Hatch Act would call by its proper name.
None of those people live in Kentucky’s Fourth District. None of them will live with the consequences of who represents it. They will not pay its property taxes, drive its roads, send their children to its schools, or bury their dead in its ground. They simply wanted Thomas Massie removed from a federal seat that did not belong to them, and they had the money and the offices to make it happen.
The shame of this election does not belong to them. Outside money will always look for purchase. Foreign-aligned interests will always test whether a congressman can be bought or broken or replaced. A President jealous of dissent will always reach for whatever lever he has. These are constants. The Founders knew them, wrote about them at length, and designed the House of Representatives as the firewall — small districts, two-year terms, the chamber closest to the people — so that the citizens themselves would be the thing strangers could not get past. The People’s House was supposed to be the one room in the federal government that no one could enter without going through us first.
The shame belongs to the district.
Fifty-four percent of the Republican primary voters of the Fourth District allowed a war cabinet, a foreign lobby, and a presidential grievance operation to decide who they would send to Washington. They did not have to. The money was loud, but the ballot was theirs. They knew their congressman; many of them had voted for him seven times. They watched a Defense Secretary fly into their county and tell them how to vote, and a majority of them did what he said. That is not representation. That is supervised representation, which is to say, no representation at all.
The generational split in the result deserves a closer look than it is getting in the national press, because it tells us something about what comes next. Massie won younger Republican voters. Older Republican voters — the most reliable primary electorate in any election anywhere — carried Gallrein over the line. This will be reported as a sign of the President’s strength. It is not. It is a sign of the President’s narrowing base.
Consider what Massie was running on in the closing weeks. He was the loudest Republican voice in Washington against another foreign war. He was the loudest Republican voice demanding the release of the unredacted Epstein files. He was a vocal and consistent critic of executive overreach on tariffs, on war powers, on the use of the military at home. Those are the exact grievances that the younger voters who broke for Donald Trump in 2024 cited as their reasons for breaking. They were promised an anti-war, anti-establishment, accountability-minded President. Massie was the only Republican in Congress still running on that promise.
If those voters could not be mobilized — in a Republican primary, against an out-of-state war cabinet and a foreign lobby — to defend the one Republican congressman echoing the things they said they wanted, then the question is not whether they will turn out for the President in November. The question is whether they are still inside the coalition at all. A turnout deficit can be rallied back. A coalition that has quietly walked out the door cannot. The people who broke this congressman with thirty-two million dollars may discover that they spent the money to remove the last argument that was keeping a generation of voters in the building.
But that is their problem, not ours. They will not solve it here. The seat in the Fourth District is already gone.
The lesson is older than this race and will outlive it. A representative who lives among us, whose children attend our schools, whose neighbors are our neighbors, whose votes are cast within reach of our complaints, is the only kind of representative the Constitution actually contemplates. Everything else is a placeholder, and a placeholder is what the Fourth District just installed. The people who flew in to break Massie did not come to give the Fourth better representation. They came to give it more obedient representation. Those are not the same thing, and the office was not made for the latter.
We have to stop letting people who do not live with us choose the people who speak for us. Not because Massie was right about everything — he was not. Because the seat is ours, the cost of bad votes is ours, and the dignity of self-government requires that the choice be ours as well.
— Nathaniel Leery
