Washington Post
By Mike Debonis
August 14, 2015
When
Jeff Flake led a congressional delegation to Cuba nine years ago, he
came, as is the custom, bearing gifts for his Communist hosts. But
instead of a plaque or trinket,
Flake brought copies of “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith’s seminal
economic treatise, and “Free to Choose,” Milton Friedman’s paean to
capitalism.
The
gospel of free markets has yet to transform Cuba, but Flake will be in
Havana on Friday to witness a milestone he has long advocated during his
nearly 15 years in
Congress: the reopening of the U.S. embassy and the formal end of a
54-year diplomatic freeze.
“It’s
going to be quite a moment,” said Flake, who has visited Cuba a dozen
times, adding, “I wish there were some other Republicans.”
That
the junior senator from Arizona will be the only Republican lawmaker in
the American delegation accompanying Secretary of State John F. Kerry
is the latest reminder
of Flake’s unusual willingness to chart his own path on some of the
nation’s most divisive issues.
On
a range of matters — Cuban relations, nuclear negotiations with Iran
and immigration policy, to name a few — Flake has found himself more
closely aligned with President
Obama than conservatives in his own party.
Flake
says he abides by advice he got upon arriving in the House in 2001: “If
you vote consistent enough, then when there’s a vote people don’t
understand, they’ll give
you the benefit of the doubt.”
In
his six House terms, Flake has carved out a distinct profile as a
spending hawk willing to take on anyone — including his own party’s
leadership — to curb federal profligacy.
When Congress banned spending earmarks in 2010, he could rightly claim
to have actually changed Washington.
“A
true conservative, Flake is as rare as the dodo,” Esquire wrote in
2008. The Weekly Standard in 2011 called him “a tea partier before there
were tea partiers.”
In
the years since, the party orthodoxy on spending has only moved closer
to Flake. But on other issues, Flake has stuck to his free-market, often
libertarian principles
even as the party has hardened around other positions, and conservative
activists aren’t giving him the benefit of the doubt.
In
the 2012 race for the seat he now holds, he won the endorsement of the
Senate Conservatives Fund, a group established by then-Sen. Jim DeMint
(R-S.C.) to elect more
rock-ribbed candidates.
Now
the same group is threatening to support a primary challenger three
years before Flake is up for reelection. Ken Cuccinelli II, the fund’s
president, said in a statement
that Flake has been “an embarrassment” to conservatives.
“Whether
it’s supporting amnesty, gun control, Obamacare funding, or the
president’s failed foreign policy, Senator Flake has betrayed the voters
who sent him to Washington
and should be replaced with a true conservative in 2018,” Cuccinelli
said in a statement.
Conservative darling to scourge
Flake
does not seem particularly shaken by his transformation from
conservative darling to scourge. In a series of interviews this year, he
said he remains determined
to follow his own path.
“Life’s
too short,” he said this week. “Certainly my political life is too
short to worry about these kinds of things. I would not serve my
constituents well by being
in lockstep with the party. I wouldn’t be able to justify the time it
takes away from my family and everything else if I were just
go-along-to-get-along.”
On
spending issues, Flake remains doctrinaire. On the 2016 federal budget,
he opposed every amendment that would have hiked spending. He was one
of only three senators
— joining Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) — to vote
against an amendment opposing Medicaid benefit cuts.
He
holds stellar ratings from the Club for Growth and the National
Taxpayers Union. And he has maintained a sharp focus on government
waste, highlighting government programs
he’d cut in social-media-friendly packages like his recent “Jurassic
Pork” report or his March Madness-themed “Egregious Eight Tournament of
Waste.”
But
with the congressional appropriations process again stalled, Flake has
found it difficult to be the kind of spending hawk he was in the House,
digging into programs,
line item by line item.
At
a Rotary Club luncheon in Sedona in March, Flake described how he made
enemies in his own party by calling out earmarkers on the House floor
and how a succession of
pay-to-play scandals finally led to their demise.
“There’s still a ban on earmarks in Congress, and that’s a good thing,” Flake declared to applause.
But
explaining his conservative bona fides these days requires elaborating
on the federal budgetary process — detailing the demise of “regular
order” and the rise of the
continuing resolution and the last-minute omnibus spending bill.
That
has left conservative activists to dwell on his more recent positions:
His support for comprehensive immigration reform, including the
bipartisan Gang of Eight talks;
his backing of Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran; and his vote to
confirm Loretta Lynch as attorney general.
“There
is something that’s fundamentally changed since he’s been in the
Senate,” said Dwight Kadar, a retired businessman and Republican
activist who came to the Rotary
luncheon with a “Don’t Tread on Me” pin on his jacket. “In fact, I told
him . . . ‘I don’t recognize you anymore. I don’t think you’re really
representing Northern Arizona and its values.’ ”
The ‘anti-Ted Cruz’
Flake,
52, and those who know him best insist he hasn’t changed much at all
since succeeding former senator Jon Kyl (R). But his unorthodox
positions have become a lot
harder for conservatives to overlook. That has proved doubly true as
Senate classmate Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) gained a prominent national profile
through his hard-line opposition to Obama.
Instead,
Flake has tried to forge a different kind of conservative identity —
one more focused on a long-term strategy of reining in the federal
government rather than
winning the next Republican primary.
“He’s
sort of the anti-Ted Cruz,” said Clint Bolick, vice president for
litigation of the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, a free-market think
tank Flake once led. “He
doesn’t seem to be consumed by ambition. He’d like to get some things
done, and this is the right place and the right time.”
Flake
says he’s itching to move beyond spotlighting wasteful programs to
“play a role in the big deal, the grand bargain, if you will” —
referring to the elusive prospect
of a bipartisan solution to rein in the national debt.
But
what Flake has witnessed so far in the Senate has disappointed him. His
dimmest day in Congress, he says, was when his colleagues killed, 95-3,
a provision in the
2013 Ryan-Murray budget deal that would have slightly reduced the
annual cost-of-living adjustment for younger military retirees, saving
the government $6 billion.
“I
thought, if we can’t stand the pressure that comes from a small group
like that, how are you ever going to stand up to the broader groups?” he
said.
Flake
is now playing a more visible role in foreign affairs, his other area
of political passion dating back to his days as a young Mormon
missionary in Namibia. There,
he grew skeptical of American efforts to wall off nations politically
and economically in hopes of changing their policies.
On
Cuba, “he’s helped many other Republicans to take a second look at the
issue, that we don’t need a separate foreign policy on Cuba when we have
trade with, diplomatic
relations with . . . many other countries we disagree with on human
rights issues,” said Phil Peters, a former State Department official who
runs the nonpartisan Cuba Research Center and has accompanied Flake on
several of his dozen trips there.
And
Flake’s thinking on the Iran deal is being watched intensely given that
his support could give Obama’s efforts at least a patina of
bipartisanship.
In
remarks on the Senate floor last week, Flake said he remains undecided
and that he could still be convinced to vote in support if he were more
thoroughly assured that
the U.S. would retain the ability to reimpose sanctions on Iran for
supporting “nefarious non-nuclear activities.”
That
position is considerably more nuanced than the defiant line held by
most congressional Republicans, and even the possibility that Flake
might support the deal has
outraged conservatives.
Flake
retains strong support in the Arizona business community; holds an
enviable political base in the northeastern part of the state, where the
Flake family settled
in 1878; and, like fellow Arizona Republican John McCain, is hoping his
maverick streak works in his favor.
“He
didn’t come to Washington without a clue of what he was doing; he went
out there purposely to change things and take on the establishment, and I
think that really
resonates for people here,” said Brian Murray, an Arizona political
consultant who advised Flake’s 2012 campaign.
Bolick
says Flake is the “ideological heir” to his group’s namesake, five-term
senator Barry Goldwater. “By and large, it is the right fit for
Arizona.”
To
burnish his profile back home, Flake has staked out a role on the
particularly Arizonan issues of fire, water and land management. Still,
his refusal to stay in an
ideological box has caused him political fits.
Social
conservatives blasted Flake’s 2013 votes for the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act and to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in
the military. Liberals and
moderates blasted his opposition that year to more stringent federal
background checks for gun buyers, and his immigration stance seems to
have pleased no one at all.
When
Flake announced earlier this year that, with comprehensive reform
faltering, he was co-sponsoring a bill that would toughen border
security without addressing undocumented
residents already in the U.S., an Arizona Republic editorial declared
him “part of the immigration problem.”
More
recently, he has co-authored a bill to crack down on so-called
“sanctuary cities.” But he has broken with GOP colleagues, including
Cruz, who want mandatory prison
terms for aliens who re-enter the country illegally after being
deported.
Flake
acknowledges enjoying the luxury of his principles in a non-election
cycle: “There are a lot of good things about the Senate,” he told a
gathering of local officials
in Sedona. “But nothing better than a six-year term. Don’t let anyone
tell you otherwise.”
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