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This morning’s headlines are about Jeff Flake, but I find myself thinking about Roy Moore. Right now, it seems that the Republican Party has room for Moore but not Flake.
Flake, of course, is the Republican senator and Trump critic who announced yesterday that he wouldn’t run for re-election, because he thought that winning would require giving in to Trumpism. “It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end,” he said on the Senate floor.
Moore is the former judge who recently won the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Alabama. He is also a demagogue who has called homosexuality “evil” and “so heinous” and who engaged in a discussion, on video, about whether it should be “punished by death.”
After Flake’s speech, his Senate colleagues applauded and honored him. But applause is easy. The more important question is: What are those same senators doing about Moore — a man who, unlike President Trump, can still be prevented from taking high office?
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They are endorsing him, that’s what.
Mike Lee of Utah has praised Moore’s “tested reputation of integrity.” Rand Paul of Kentucky has lauded Moore for “defending and standing up for the Constitution.” Ted Cruz, just a couple of hours before Flake’s speech, released a full-throated endorsement of Moore that celebrated his “lifelong passion for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”
Yes, you heard that correctly: They are praising the integrity and Constitutional commitment of a man who refused to take a stand against whether gay and lesbian Americans should be executed.
Moore was also removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for violating judicial ethics. He has said that Muslims should not be allowed in Congress and suggested that 9/11 was the result of this country’s godlessness. (If you want to read the full comments yourself, you can do so via CNN, Time and The Hill.)
So far, only one Republican senator has spoken out against Moore, according to Politico. His name is Jeff Flake. “When we disagree with something so fundamental,” he said last month, “we ought to stand up and say, ‘That’s not right, that’s not our party, that is not us.’”
I leave you with a longer excerpt from Flake’s prepared remarks yesterday than you’re likely to find in most news stories:
“Acting on conscience and principle is the manner in which we express our moral selves, and as such, loyalty to conscience and principle should supersede loyalty to any man or party. We can all be forgiven for failing in that measure from time to time. I certainly put myself at the top of the list of those who fall short in that regard. I am holier-than-none.
“But too often, we rush not to salvage principle but to forgive and excuse our failures so that we might accommodate them and go right on failing — until the accommodation itself becomes our principle.
“In that way and over time, we can justify almost any behavior and sacrifice almost any principle. I’m afraid that this is where we now find ourselves.”
How It Played in Trumpworld. “Not one critical word by Flake of the Dems’ obstructionism, biased press. Speech could have been delivered by Obama or Pelosi,” charged Laura Ingraham, the right-wing commentator. “Had Hillary won, he’d be happy today,” she tweeted.
On his show, Sean Hannity decried the “snowflake, whiny” Flake as part of the “pathetic, weak, gutless, spineless, never-Trumper establishment Republican forces, all lashing out against the president.” G.O.P. senators who have criticized or broken with Trump are “standing in the way of enacting an agenda to help move the country forward, what the people voted for last November, and they’re trying to be martyrs in the process,” Hannity said.
Breitbart’s home page blared a three-word, flashing headline yesterday: “Winning: Flake Out.” Charlie Spiering, Breitbart’s White House correspondent, tweeted, “McConnell’s team now 0-3 #LosersGoHome,” referring to the demise of Flake and two other establishment Republican senators, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Luther Strange of Alabama. Strange lost a primary to none other than Roy Moore.
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