America’s second-least-popular senator is ending his tenure not with a bang but a bawling declaration that in the name of resistance (that he had two years to progress), he will finally, at last, stand up to Trump and refuse to vote for … judicial nominees.

After serving two years in the Senate while Trump occupied the White House, Flake could have led a popular movement to reclaim tariff powers back to the legislature or provide a viable Obamacare alternative rather than wait in the limelight during the disastrous rollout of the haphazard skinny repeal bill. Instead, Flake has chosen the Trump administration’s most conservative agenda, judicial appointments, to tackle a problem that could have been dealt with a year ago: protecting special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.