Sen. Jeff Flake: Republican Party ‘might not deserve to lead’

U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) continued to push back against the Republican Party for its support of President Donald Trump.

“If my party is going to try to pass off the degradation of the United States and her values from the White House as normal, if we are going to cloister ourselves in the alternative truth of an erratic leader, if we are going to refuse to live in the world that everyone else lives in and reckon with the daily reality that they face,” he said, “then my party might not deserve to lead.”

The junior senator delivered the comments Thursday in Washington during a speech at the National Press Club titled “Truth, Falsehoods, and the Dangerous State of Our Politics: A Way Forward.”

Flake, 55, has said he had no plans to run for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination. But he also hasn’t ruled it out.

In the speech, Flake argued that his fellow lawmakers should be emboldened to speak out in order to defend democratic institutions if they are under threat from within.

“A politics that keeps us silent when we should speak is worthless in defense of the things we hold most dear. And as an article of faith, I firmly believe that if one voice can do such profound damage to our values and to our civic life, then one voice can also repair that damage,” Flake said.

“One voice can call us to a higher idea of America. One voice can act as a beacon to help us find ourselves once again, after this terrible fever breaks. And it will break.”

Flake, who took to the Senate floor in January to argue that Trump’s attacks on both the media and facts could cause long-term damage to the United States, said his party will “get through this, and when we do, there will be much work to do to repair the damage.

“There will have to be an American restoration. And for the sake of the common good and for basic human decency – we will have to create a new politics,” he argued.

“This will be the obligation of all of us – those of us in elective office, those of us who will soon not be, and those us too smart to ever engage in politics in the first place.”

Flake called upon his fellow lawmakers to “throw our backs into reinforcing the beams of the American system of justice, to make sure that never again will the independence of the judiciary be so threatened and the tenets of justice be so abused.”

We will not wink and nod at dictators.

Nor will we congratulate them for the good job they are doing in their programs of extrajudicial killings.

Nor will we host them in the Oval Office.

Nor will we hesitate to punish them for attacking our elections.

No, when this period is behind us, when the congress passes Russia sanctions with a sense of urgency, then you can be sure that we will implement those sanctions immediately.

No excuses.

The junior senator ended his remarks by pushing for leadership that “recognizes the once-seminal American notion of the common good” and acknowledged that it would be hard to “swing this pendulum away from the toxicity of our current moment.

“Yes, the pendulum swings, thank goodness, and the people themselves will show us the way out of here,” he said.

“If this sounds like the call to a new politics, it is. But it is just as much a call to a politics that is not at all new – to the best traditions of America – of true leadership and vision – of Lincoln’s malice toward none, and charity for all.”

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