Arizona Republican Jeff Flake returned to the Senate from his three-week trip to Zimbabwe and Botswana on Monday night. The retiring senator had gone to Zimbabwe to serve as an official observer in the country’s presidential election held in late July, but he raised eyebrows back in D.C. when Republicans learned that he planned to stay for much of the month of August, missing Senate business in the meantime.
In a brief hallway conversation with THE WEEKLY STANDARD after votes on Monday night, Flake discussed his trip and the backlash he received in response to his travel plans.
“I needed to be there. That was just a couple of days at the end of June or July,” Flake said of the first week he had missed due to his role as an election observer. After that, the Senate recessed from August 6 through 15. But Flake was absent for last week’s short work period, which lasted from Wednesday afternoon until Thursday afternoon. He shrugged that off, pointing to the fact that “this one was a day and a half.” (The Arizona senator wasn’t the only Republican to stay home last week.)
Asked whether Republican leaders had been irritated with him for being out of town for most of the month, even in light of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to scrap the traditional August recess, Flake suggested he hadn’t missed much. “I talked to them before, and it was okay,” he told TWS. But Republican members and their aides were frustrated when they learned how long he would be gone, with some expressing fears that the trip would hurt GOP campaign efforts by keeping Vice President Mike Pence close to the Capitol instead of on the campaign trail in order to break ties precipitated by Flake’s absence.
During the second half of Flake’s visit, he and his wife visited his son, who finished his time as a Mormon missionary in the region on August 17. Flake and his wife met with the people his son had been working with, different officials, and the president of Botswana before the family flew back to the United States together. “That was the coolest by far,” said Flake. “I served my own mission down there 35 years ago in Zimbabwe and South Africa. So yeah, it was great. Great trip.”
As TWS first reported, Flake was one of three GOP senators, including Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, to miss a Judiciary committee meeting on Thursday of last week, leading to a delay for 12 judicial nominations. The blame can’t be pinned on just one of them in particular: Any one of the three senators could have helped Republicans avoid the hindrance simply by attending the meeting.
Procedurally, Republicans needed eight of their members to show up in order to form a sufficient quorum—made up of nine people—to cut short the amount of time required to advance the appointees. On Thursday, ranking member Dianne Feinstein (who attends the meetings as a courtesy) was in the room, along with seven Republicans. Just one more GOP senator would have made the difference.
During our conversation, Flake also rejected claims that he had intended to sabotage President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees by taking the trip.
“I’m not that clever, I guess,” he said.
