Exit Flake

In a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) announced his intention not to seek reelection in 2018. We regret his decision and the state of affairs that led him to make it: Flake is a solid conservative and is a decent man, an implacable critic of government waste and a consistent and vocal proponent of fiscal judiciousness.

We did not always agree with Flake on national security issues—he’s often, and probably rightly, called a “libertarian”—but his reputation as a conservative is well deserved: As John McCormack explained in this week’s feature story on the Flake, as a House member from 2001 to 2013 he was known “as a budget hawk who bucked congressional leaders and President George W. Bush by opposing earmarks, No Child Left Behind, and Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit.” He won a Senate seat in 2012 with the backing of Jim DeMint; and although he has not stood out from his Senate colleagues in the last five years, he is a reliably conservative vote.

Flake did not support Donald Trump’s candidacy and, unlike many of his congressional colleagues, never made peace with the new president. He did not endorse Ted Cruz or otherwise take an active role in opposing Trump in the 2016 campaign, but he has not tergiversated on Trump in the manner of Bob Corker, either.

In August he published a book, Conscience of a Conservative, in which he censured both Trump and the party that nominated him. “Never has a party so quickly or easily abandoned its core principles as my party did in the course of the 2016 campaign,” wrote Flake. “Following the lead of a candidate who had a special skill for identifying problems, if not for solving them, we lurched like a tranquilized elephant from a broad consensus on economic philosophy and free trade that had held for generations to an incoherent and often untrue mash of back-of-the-envelope populist slogans.”

In his speech on the Senate floor, too, Flake inveighed against the GOP. “I will not be complicit or silent,” he said. “I’ve decided that I would be better able to represent the people of Arizona and to better serve my country and my conscience by freeing myself of the political consideration that consumed far too much bandwidth and would cause me to compromise far too many principles.”