Inside Track
Arizona Senator Jeff Flake Calls It Quits, Blames Trump
Republican Senator Jeff Flake, the junior senator from Arizona, announced on the Senate floor October 24 that he would not be seeking reelection: “I have decided that I will be better able to represent the people of Arizona and to better serve my country and my conscience by freeing myself from the political considerations that consume far too much bandwidth and would cause me to compromise far too many principles. To that end, I am announcing today that my service in the Senate will conclude at the end of my term in early January 2019.”
Flake admonished his cohorts not to ignore America’s current difficulties: “We must be unafraid to stand up and speak out.… I plan to spend the remaining fourteen months of my senate term doing just that…. We must never regard as ‘normal’ the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country: the personal attacks, the threats against principles, the reckless provocations.”
Flake continued, leveling his charges at the current occupant of the White House without mentioning Trump by name: “We must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as ‘telling it like it is,’ when it is actually just reckless, outrageous, and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else: it is dangerous to a democracy.”
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