It seems like we have to write the same damn blog post about Arizona Senator Jeff Flake every month, pointing out how utterly useless he is as a Republican senator who claims to have a LOT of BIG problems with the Trump administration, while continuing to vote in line with Donald Trump’s agenda 84 percent of the time. (That’s a solid B!)
As long as Flake keeps sending out dumbass tweets like this one, it looks like we will continue to do so:
Flake, who is retiring from Congress at the end of his term, has cast himself as a Brave Resister of Trump’s noxious politics within his own party. But if you agree with someone 84 percent of the time, that doesn’t indicate that your own politics are considerably different from the person you’re tepidly criticizing on Twitter.
Unlike the rest of us, Flake can actually do something rather than just tweeting ineffectually about the state of the country; he simply chooses not to. He didn’t have to vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He didn’t have to vote for his party’s wildly regressive tax bill, which served not just as an historic handout to the country’s already wealthy, but materially hurt the poor by cutting off government aid for healthcare.
No one put a gun to Flake’s head when he sold out DACA recipients in exchange for more tax cuts for the rich, or when he voted to confirm all but two of Trump’s Cabinet nominees (Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and torture queen turned CIA Director Gina Haspel). As a person with free will, he chose to do all of those things himself.
This is exactly who you are, Jeff Flake. This is your party—not just since Trump became president, but long before then. If you hate what that looks like, that might be a conversation better suited for your therapist than for Twitter or Meet the Press.