Jeff Flflake if I Was Running Again
Jeff Flake: My Fellow Republicans, Trump Is Destroying Us
At that place is power in continuing upwardly to the rank corruptions of a demagogue.
Mr. Flake is a former Republican senator from Arizona.
[Follow our alive coverage as Trump protesters stormed the US Capitol .]
Today, in what is meant to be a solemn ritual of democracy, Congress meets in articulation session to consecrate the will of the American people and mark the election of Joe Biden as president.
Unfortunately, President Trump refuses to accept the reality of his substantial loss, then becomes determined to create an alternate reality in which he won. As he crosses that rubicon, Mr. Trump has taken many in my political party with him, all of whom seem to have learned the wrong lessons from this anomalous presidency. George Orwell, subsequently all, meant for his piece of work to serve as a warning, not as a template.
How many injuries to American democracy tin my Republican Political party tolerate, alibi and champion? Information technology is elementary to have to say then, just for democracy to work ane side must be prepared to accept defeat. If the only acceptable effect is for your side to win, and a loser merely refuses to lose, then America is imperiled.
I once had a career in public life — six terms in the House of Representatives and another half-dozen years in the Senate — so the rising of a dangerous demagogue, and my party'south embrace of him, ended that career. Or rather, I chose not to proceed with my political party's rejection of its core conservative principles in favor of that demagogue. In a speech on the Senate floor on Oct. 24, 2017, I announced that because of the turn my party had taken, I would not run for re-election: the career of a politician that is complicit in undermining his own values doesn't mean much.
As a lifelong bourgeois Republican, I was surprised to observe myself so profoundly at odds with my ain party and with the man who had used its ballot line to vault to power. Just the values that fabricated me a conservative and an American were indeed beingness undermined, the country was paying a steep price for it, and I would exist a liar to my family, my state and my conscience if I were to pretend otherwise.
Information technology is hard to embrace how so many of my swain Republicans were able — and are still able — to engage in the fantasy that they had not abruptly abandoned the principles they claimed to believe in. It is also difficult to empathise how this expose could be driven by deference to the unprincipled, incoherent and blatantly cocky-interested politics of Donald Trump, defined as information technology is by its anarchy and boundless dishonesty. The conclusion that I have come to is that they did it for the basest of reasons — sheer survival and rank opportunism.
But survival divorced from principle makes a politician unable to defend the institutions of American liberty when they come up under threat by enemies strange and domestic. And keeping your head down in capitulation to a rogue president makes you niggling more than article of furniture. One wonders if that is what my fellow Republicans had in listen when they first sought public office.
But if it was my obligation to end my congressional career by speaking out in defiance, and so my time in Congress had begun in awe.
Information technology was the first few days of my first term in Congress — Saturday, January. half-dozen, 2001, xx years ago today — when I witnessed an act of borough faith that was simply extraordinary. With utmost fidelity to our founding principles and the reverence the United States Constitution deserves, ane presidential administration handed over power to another, peacefully and with dignity, after the nearly highly contentious election in more than a century, an election decided by just a few hundred votes in a single state. Perhaps nigh moving of all was that this ritual transition of our democracy had over the time since our founding go so ordinary.
A kid from Snowflake, Ariz., doesn't often get to witness such history, and so I kept a periodical:
The family unit flew home on Fri afternoon. I had to stay until Saturday afternoon because the House and Senate met in joint session to count electoral votes. Given the disputed election, there were fears that the Democrats would try to pull something. A dozen or then House Democrats did object to the Florida electoral votes, but because they failed to get any Senate Democrats to sign on with them, they failed to thwart the proceedings. It was quite a spectacle still. Vice President Al Gore, who presided over this historic meeting, was forced to call the game for his opponent, George West. Bush. I met Gore afterward, who had to be feeling pretty rotten to accept won the pop vote but to take lost in the Balloter College.
I thing I left out of my journal entry was that in affirming that his opponent, George W. Bush, would be our next president, Mr. Gore said this: "May God bless our new president and new vice president, and may God anoint the United States of America."
Mr. Gore's was an act of grace that the American people had every right to expect of someone in his position, a testament to the robustness and immovability of American ramble republic. That he was simply doing his job and discharging his responsibility to the Constitution is what made the moment both profound and ordinary.
Vice President Mike Pence must practise the aforementioned today. As we are now learning, a healthy democracy is wholly dependent on the good volition and proficient faith of those who offer to serve it.
Today, the American people deserve to witness the majesty of a peaceful transfer of power, merely as I saw, awe-struck, two decades ago. Instead, we discover ourselves in this bizarre status of our own making, two weeks from the inauguration of a new president, with madness unspooling from the White Business firm, grievous damage to our trunk politic compounding daily.
My fellow Republicans, as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia has shown us this week, there is power in standing up to the rank corruptions of a demagogue. Mr. Trump can't hurt yous. But he is destroying us.
Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake), a onetime Republican senator from Arizona, is the author of "Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Subversive Politics and a Render to Principle."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/opinion/jeff-flake-trump-republicans.html
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