GOP Senator Jeff Flake may have just tipped off his Supreme Court vote
Now that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, Donald Trump will get to try to replace the longtime swing-vote moderate with a corrupt conservative extremist. If Trump succeeds, every reasonable ruling from the court in the past fifty years will be overturned, and Americans will be left without their basic rights. There are a handful of comparatively moderate Republican Senators who can stop this. One of them, Jeff Flake, may have just tipped his hand.
Flake just announced that he has no intention of holding of Trump’s Supreme Court pick over tariffs. However, it doesn’t matter so much what Flake is saying, but what he’s doing. We already know he’s not running for reelection in November. It’s never been clear what he plans to do instead – until now. Flake has spent the week interviewing with MSNBC and CNN for a cable news commentator gig, according to the Daily Beast. Why is this important? It tells us which segment of the public Flake is planning to align himself with after he leaves office.
Try to imagine a scenario in which Jeff Flake helps Donald Trump to put a Justice on the Supreme Court who’s going to overturn Roe v Wade, and then Flake shows up as a host or commentator on MSNBC. The audience would boot him off the air before the end of his first week. It’s clear that Flake wants to have a future as a political expert on mainstream cable news. The only way he can make that happen is if he defies Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
Whether or not you trust Jeff Flake to do the right thing for America, you can trust him to do the right thing for himself. If he were talking to Fox News about a gig, then we’d conclude that he’s ready to rubber stamp Trump’s agenda on the way out the Senate door. Instead he’s trying to get the kind of gig where he’ll only survive if he meaningfully defies Trump on his way out the door – and he knows that. For those who are making calls and trying to convince one or more GOP Senators to block Trump’s nominee, Flake just became a primary target.
