‘I Will Not Be Complicit or Silent’
U.S. Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, has just announced he will not seek re-election but retire at the end of his term in January of 2019. In an emotional and eloquent speech from the Senate floor Sen. Flake blasted his fellow Republican Senators and even voters for not standing up to President Donald Trump.
He labeled Trump’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior” a danger to democracy.Â
“It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end,” Flake told his colleagues, specifying “all of our complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs.”
“I have children and grandchildren to answer to,” Flake noted. “I will not be complicit or silent.”
“We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals,” Flake said. Â
Flake also lamented that “our democracy is more defined by our discord and our dysfunction than it is by our values and our principles.”
“We must never regard as ‘normal’ the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country – the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.”
“It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, and who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican party — the party that for so long has defined itself by belief in those things. It is also clear to me for the moment we have given in or given up on those core principles in favor of the more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment. To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess we have created are justified. But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.”
The full text of Sen. Flake’s speech can be read at The Arizona Republic.Â
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