Another day, another drama: yet another Republican senator has publicly denounced President Trump in a speech that received a standing ovation on the Senate floor.
According to CNN, Arizona senator Jeff Flake has announced that he will not be running for re-election in 2018 — and in the same speech he gave to the Senate on Tuesday, he became yet another member of a growing group of legislators in the POTUS’s own party that are vocal critics of the Trump administration.
“If I have been critical, it’s not because I relish criticizing the behavior of the President of the United States,” Flake said in the 17-minute speech. “If I have been critical, it is because I believe that it is my obligation to do so, as a matter of duty and conscience.”
Jeff Flake: “I have children & grandchildren to answer to, and so Mr. President, I will not be complicit or silent.” pic.twitter.com/w26ylbiEPn
— Scott Dworkin (@funder) October 24, 2017
Without having to mention the president’s name once, he continued, “The notion that one should stay silent as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters — the notion that one should say and do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric and, I believe, profoundly misguided.”
Flake joins Sen. Bob Corker, who has been the target of many of Trump’s recent Twitter attacks, as one of the president’s most vocal critics in the GOP. Corker is also retiring from the Senate in 2018, meaning neither senator has anything to lose by speaking out against Trump.
Meanwhile, several of Republican senator John McCain’s recent remarks about the president have echoed much of what Corker and Flake have been getting at.
“To refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history,” McCain said, referencing the president in a speech last week.