After a half-century of existence, the Libertarian Party (L.P.) this morning wakes up to a situation it has never before experienced—with a sitting member of Congress proudly waving the Libertarian flag.

“I will be the first,” Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) told me late Tuesday* night, just after announcing his candidacy for the Libertarian presidential nomination. “And I’m happy to do that.”

Amash is not the only person smiling. In an email, Libertarian Party Chair Nicholas Sarwark said, “I’m happy to see that Representative Amash has come home to the political party most closely aligned with his views,” adding: “If more members of the House who are tired of being marginalized by the GOP and Democratic leadership joined him, we could see a caucus of legislators who are able to work for the American people instead of conflicting teams of special interests. My DMs are open.”

Amash, a persistent critic of President Donald Trump who left the Republican Party to become an independent last July 4, was facing a competitive reelection campaign in his 3rd District of Michigan, a state whose straight-ticket ballot option disfavors candidates outside the two major parties. Yet he says his seat could have been defended.

“That was one of the hardest parts of this decision,” he said. “When I’m looking at my polling, and fundraising, and other aspects with respect to the congressional campaign, I felt I was in the driver’s seat. I felt that I was in a very strong position to win it….But I just think this is too important.”

Amash, who is six-for-six in general elections (five in Congress, one in the Michigan House of Representatives), claims that the 2020 presidential contest is a “winnable race” for a Libertarian Party whose previous high-water mark, in 2016, was 3.3 percent of the vote.

“When I look at these candidates, I think most Americans see the same thing I’m seeing, which is these two candidates aren’t up to being president of the United States, and we need an alternative,” he said. The botched and expensive federal response to the COVID-19 outbreak only makes that clearer, he said. “Millions of Americans are seeing that the government spent trillions of dollars and still didn’t get it right. They didn’t get help to the people who need it most. Instead, most of the assistance went to people who have great connections, who run big corporations.”

I talked to Amash about his late entry into the Libertarian race, his policy objections to Joe Biden, his position on abortion, charges that he would “spoil” the effort to dethrone President Donald Trump, and more. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

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Reason: What took you so long?

Amash: Well, I’ve been spending time with my family, with friends; I wanted to spend substantial time thinking about it carefully. And up until the past month or so, let’s say, I couldn’t really think about it that carefully. There were a lot of things going on in Congress, there were a lot of things going on in life.

Around February I decided I would pause my congressional campaign and really focus on the presidential race. And that meant at the time just researching things, seeing if it was a situation where I could come in as a candidate and win the race. And then over the past few weeks, I really sat down to dig into it and got to the point where I was confident that this was a winnable race. Because I don’t believe you should just run for fun or for messaging. I believe you should run to win, and to make an impact at the ballot box.

So I’m at that place, and I’m in.

Reason: So you start in mid-February—that’s not coronavirus o’clock, but the coronavirus came up by the beginning of March. So explain a little bit how that affected your deliberations, if at all.

Amash: Well, it certainly extended the deliberations. So if not for the COVID-19 situation, I would have been able to focus on it more carefully earlier. In other words, the really aggressive focus on the campaign—where I could think “Is it time to get in or not?”—had to be put on hold a little bit. I was already in the process of researching things, talking to people, talking to family and friends. But when the coronavirus came up, I had to slow that down, because that obviously affects the entire race, and obviously it affects my job, too. I’m in Congress trying to help constituents, making sure that they are getting the resources they need, and so it affected my ability to move forward quickly.

Reason: I look at the coronavirus thing in particular, and you see a lot of 388-5 votes in the House about various phases of this happening. Do you look at a situation in which $3 trillion has walked out of Congress in the last, I don’t know, six weeks—and basically overwhelmingly, near-unanimously, despite Thomas Massie’s best efforts. Is that a fruitful backdrop from which to run a limited-government campaign?

Amash: I think so. I mean, millions of Americans are seeing that the government spent trillions of dollars and still didn’t get it right. They didn’t get help to the people who need it most. Instead, most of the assistance went to people who have great connections, who run big corporations. Those people, they got it really fast; [Treasury Secretary Steven] Mnuchin couldn’t act fast enough to help those people.

But for millions of Americans who are unemployed or struggling right now, they couldn’t get relief to those people, because they have a massive convoluted system, and they doubled and tripled down on it. They said, “Hey, how can we take our bad system and make it worse? Let’s add a whole bunch of restrictions; let’s add a whole bunch of qualifications; let’s try to get money to small businesses but then make it so that the money is not all that useful to them. Let’s put banks in the middle of it to slow down the process.”

And the banks are trying; they’re trying. I’m not blaming the banks. I blame Congress and the administration for creating such a system….The Los Angeles Lakers applied for relief as a small business, and you know, under the terms of the deal that Congress put together with the White House, that’s actually allowed. But they never thought through this thing, really.