Outgoing Republican United States Senator Jeff Flake has made himself a national figure by being a bit of a maverick in the tradition of his Arizona colleague, the late John McCain. Unlike McCain, Flake will not ride out his political career to its final days in the Senate.
Ironically, Flake first stepped out from the relative obscurity of being little more than one one-hundredth of the Senate membership when he announced his intention to step down from an expected bid for re-election.
Flakes retirement from the upper chamber was not due to age, moving on to another public office or the offer of a high-paying job in the private sector. He dropped out of his race for re-election because – to put it bluntly – he was not re-electable. His frequent apostasy from conservative Republican orthodoxy made him a rather unpopular figure among Arizona’s conservative Republican primary voters.
Even though a bit of a back-bencher, Flake had visions of occupying that cornerless office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. After all, if John McCain could ride maverick-hood to a presidential nomination, why not Flake?
McCain’s friends and critics were united in their belief that the late Senator was one of a kind. Flake failed to appreciate that. Also, McCain survived on the political momentum of seniority more than the abject admiration of all his Republican peers – despite the effusive eulogies.
Furthermore, Flake began to out maverick the maverick – and in doing so made himself even more unpopular than his Arizona colleague.
Once he pulled the plug on his 2018 Senate re-election bid, Flake demonstrated a bitterness by finding common cause with Senate Democrats in their #NeverTrump Resistance Movement. As one might expect, Flake’s attacks on Trump and conservative Republicans – often from the floor of the Senate — were welcomed fodder for the liberal news media. He became a frequent guest on shows that had previously failed to recognize his existence.
With Republican control of the Senate held by a razor-thin one-vote margin, Flake could leverage his vote into spotlight grabbing strategies. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Flake was able to extend the hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh for a week by siding with Democrats in what could only be described as meaningless grandstanding. Regardless, the national media focused on Flake as he huddled with the Democrats.
In one of his final imperious acts of egocentricity – at least we can hope so — Flake more recently announced that he would block all of the pending appointments to the federal bench unless the Senate put a bill to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller from an excessively reported firing by Trump – a firing that has not happen during almost two years of erroneous predictions by Democrats and the media, and an equal number of accurate refutations by Trump and administration officials that Mueller was not being fired.
Like Flake’s optics-only extension of the Kavanaugh hearings, taking a vote on the bill to protect Mueller is meaningless. The bill is not likely to pass both chambers, and if it did, it would be vetoed by Trump. There is also a serious question if it would be held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court since it appears to violate the separation of powers. And the bill, itself, does not actually prevent the President from firing Mueller. The President, not the Congress. Is in charge of hiring and firing in the Executive Branch.
In just a few short weeks, Flake will be flying off to Phoenix. While he has not announced any future plans, he seems a man too firmly embraced by the political spotlight to move into the shadowy abyss of private life.
Flake appears to have burned too many GOP bridges to restart his career in the party of Lincoln. In fact, his actions on the way out the door suggest he knows that – with one possible exception.
Flake could see himself as a primary challenger to Trump in 2020 as an independent moderate – but even Flake must realize that he has made himself too unpopular with too many Republican voters to get any political traction in the GOP.
This leaves the other option. Switch over to the Democratic Party. This would take him out of the 2020 presidential race because the Democrats already have a too many wannabes. No new kid on the block is going to push all of them aside.
However, at 55, Flake is young enough to be eligible to run for president in 2024, 2026, 2030, 2034, 2038 and maybe even in 2042, when he would be 79 years old – about the same age as two current contenders, Joe Biden, who will be 77 in 2020, and Bernie Sanders, who will be 79.
In the meantime, there is always a governorship, a return to the Senate on the other side of the aisle or a Cabinet position in some future Democrat administration. In any case, it is unlikely that America has heard the last of Jeff Flake. Arrrgh!
So, there ‘tis.
