In a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) announced his intention not to seek reelection in 2018. We regret his decision and the state of affairs that led him to make it: Flake is a solid conservative and is a decent man, an implacable critic of government waste and a consistent and vocal proponent of fiscal judiciousness.
We did not always agree with Flake on national security issues—he’s often, and probably rightly, called a “libertarian”—but his reputation as a conservative is well deserved: As John McCormack explained in this week’s feature story on the Flake, as a House member from 2001 to 2013 he was known “as a budget hawk who bucked congressional leaders and President George W. Bush by opposing earmarks, No Child Left Behind, and Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit.” He won a Senate seat in 2012 with the backing of Jim DeMint; and although he has not stood out from his Senate colleagues in the last five years, he is a reliably conservative vote.
Flake did not support Donald Trump’s candidacy and, unlike many of his congressional colleagues, never made peace with the new president. He did not endorse Ted Cruz or otherwise take an active role in opposing Trump in the 2016 campaign, but he has not tergiversated on Trump in the manner of Bob Corker, either.
In August he published a book, Conscience of a Conservative, in which he censured both Trump and the party that nominated him. “Never has a party so quickly or easily abandoned its core principles as my party did in the course of the 2016 campaign,” wrote Flake. “Following the lead of a candidate who had a special skill for identifying problems, if not for solving them, we lurched like a tranquilized elephant from a broad consensus on economic philosophy and free trade that had held for generations to an incoherent and often untrue mash of back-of-the-envelope populist slogans.”
In his speech on the Senate floor, too, Flake inveighed against the GOP. “I will not be complicit or silent,” he said. “I’ve decided that I would be better able to represent the people of Arizona and to better serve my country and my conscience by freeing myself of the political consideration that consumed far too much bandwidth and would cause me to compromise far too many principles.”
The high-minded tone shouldn’t be taken too seriously, perhaps: Flake pulled out of the race because he was down by 20 points. If he were up by that margin, we doubt very much he would have decided drop out for reasons of “conscience” or for fear of “compromise[ing] too many principles.”
There is one point on which Flake is absolutely correct, however. To make it, he drew on lines composed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1918 (Flake quoted the lines in his book, too). Roosevelt asked: Should the president be criticized in times of crisis? “The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants,” Roosevelt said.
Roosevelt had it exactly right, and we wish more members of Congress in both parties would take it to heart. Rather than praising the president when he does right and blaming him when he does wrong, a great many members—and a dismaying proportion of the chattering class—praise him no matter what or blame him no matter what. The citizens of a republic should not behave this way.
We don’t presume to know the reasons for Flake’s struggles in the polls. Nor do we understand why the Trump movement and the president’s celebrity allies—Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Steve Bannon—wanted so much to unseat the Arizona senator. Flake’s views differ from Trump’s, to be sure, particularly on trade and immigration, but his views on foreign policy and national security are closer to Trump’s than, say, Lindsey Graham’s.
We are left to conclude that Trump and his confreres wanted Flake defeated merely because Flake has said critical things about Trump. We expect this sort of vanity from Trump—it’s his brand and he owns it—but not from grown-up Republican officeholders and commentators.
Flake’s chief primary opponent, Kelli Ward, is a former state senator and current osteopath. She refers to herself as an “Americanist” and a “scurrilous nationalist,” and in 2014 expressed an interest in the “chemtrail” conspiracy (though she has since disavowed it). Does her candidacy portend a more populist and less ideologically coherent Republican Party? Is the party forcing out traditional free trade, free market conservatives in the mold of Jeff Flake? Maybe. But if 2016 taught us anything, it taught us this: No one knows what’s next.
