GARRISON, Ky. — To get Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., going, you can ask him about the national debt, but he’s just as eager to talk about the peaches he methodically grows on his Kentucky farm.
“I have 15 varieties of peaches, and they each get ripe on a different week, so peach season on this farm in Garrison starts at the end of June and goes all the way through September,” said Massie.
What You Need To Know
- Rep. Thomas Massie represents Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District
- He’s been the only dissenting vote on so much legislation, he’s earned the nickname “Mr. No”
- At home, he lives off the grid in a timber-frame home he built with his late wife Rhonda
In Washington, Massie, a Republican representing the 4th Congressional District in northeast Kentucky, is often a caucus of one.
He’s been the only dissenting vote on so much legislation, he’s earned the nickname “Mr. No.”
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Crescent Springs, trims a field at his farm in Lewis County. (Spectrum News/Erin Kelly)
Back home, he stands alone, too, living off the grid in a timber-frame home that he and his late wife Rhonda built using stones and fallen trees from their property.
“This is where I recharge my batteries,” Massie said, as he showed a Spectrum News reporter around his farm.
Solar panels and a junked electric vehicle battery provide electricity.
“I took a wrecked Model S Tesla, took the battery out of that, disassembled it and rewired it, so my house has been running off of a Model S Tesla battery for about eight years,” he said.
Massie and his wife were high school sweethearts in Vanceburg, about 15 miles away.
They both graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then founded a robotics company and sold it to move back to Appalachia.
Now he raises grass-fed cattle.
“Some of these are going to freezer camp this fall,” he said. “We have to be gentle about the wording here. They can hear us.”
An inventor, Massie holds 30 patents.
One of his creations, what he calls the “Clucks Capacitor,” protects and moves his chickens in a pen, one inch at a time.
The device plays the “Chicken Dance” song.
“I can be gone for a week and it runs by itself because it’s got a microprocessor in it that I wrote the code for, and I can tell it how much I want it to move every day,” said Massie.
Though he lives off the grid, Massie is very much plugged into politics — and on President Donald Trump’s radar.
A self-proclaimed libertarian-leaning Republican, he routinely opposes foreign aid, sanctions on foreign nations and gun safety measures.
He’s even voted against making lynching a federal hate crime, saying enhanced penalties for hate endanger liberties like freedom of speech.
A fierce deficit hawk, Massie also was one of only two GOP House members to oppose the sweeping new Republican tax and spending law that enacts the president’s agenda.
His defiance upset the President, who vowed to oppose Massie’s reelection next year.
Other opponents of the bill have said that it cuts Medicaid so much that millions of Americans would lose health care. But that’s not why Massie voted no.
“It’s not entirely clear that this is a good bill for Kentucky,” Massie said. “If you want to be parochial and talk about rural health care, there are cuts to it there as well. But ultimately, the reason I voted against this bill is because it blows the budget.”
Now, Massie finds himself aligned with Democrats, and seemingly at odds with the White House, in demanding the Justice Department release its files on the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I think the American people deserve transparency,” he said.
Massie said he is more resolved than ever since Rhonda passed away last year, after 30 years of marriage.
“Occasionally, I pick up my phone and want to text my late wife because she tracked all of it,” he said. “She usually knew about it before I did … She tracked all of it closely and I think she still is.”
If he weren’t in Congress, Massie said he would be back on his farm, tending to his livestock, growing peaches and working on his inventions.
“The independence that I’ve created or earned here on the farm, whether it’s from the food or the power that I generate or that I can build a structure with the lumber on the land, that’s what enables me to go to Washington, D.C. and say, ‘You don’t have anything over on me,’” he said. “You could literally take everything I’ve got and I can create it again, and I’ll be okay.”