Thank you for finding his explanation. I blame Facebook's infinite scroll.
I don't see this as a "hard decision." He cast a symbolic vote to remain ideologically pure. Had our Congress consisted of at least 217 Justin Amashes, their votes would have had the practical effect of denying thousands of people devastated by Hurricane Sandy from having their flood insurance claims paid. That's all the additional funding was for -- flood insurance claims. You can argue about the mismanagement of FEMA in general, but this $9.7 billion had nothing to with that. Voting down this bill would have basically forced FEMA to tell a bunch of people hit by Hurricane Sandy, "Hey, that flood insurance you paid into that you're depending on to rebuild your home? Yeah, you're not going to get any money from those claims until we figure out how much we need to jack up the age of Social Security, sorry."
This is not governing. Look, you can argue that the federal government should not be providing flood insurance (especially insurance that is heavily subsidized) as it encourages people to live in high-risk areas for natural disasters. And you can argue that the current process of allocation disaster assistance from the federal budget should have a better process than "ask for a bunch of money for flood insurance whenever FEMA runs out." I consider these are very valid points.
Yet anyone attempting to govern would make these arguments when they wouldn't interfere with thousands of people experiencing a hardship from receiving assistance that was heretofore uncontroversial, and they would actually then proceed to turn those arguments into legislation and then pass it.
This is what I mean. "Refusal to govern" means doing little else besides casting symbolic votes, which a wing of the Republican party like Rep. Amash is mostly content to do. Rep. Amash is not actually making any "hard decisions" or "right calls." He doesn't have to bear any responsibility for denying people hit by Hurricane Sandy their flood insurance claims, yet he doesn't care to actually solve the macro-level problems behind his opposition to the bill to begin with.
Afforess and anyone else -- I love discussing public policy, so if you want to continue this discussion in a more efficient manner than exchanging HN comments, just e-mail me (see my profile for the address).