Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake claimed his party is in “denial” about President Donald Trump in a recently released excerpt from his upcoming book.
Flake argued that the Republican party had helped create the Trump movement and now is in complete denial over the “chaos” the Trump presidency has created in an excerpt from his new book “Conscience of a Conservative,” featured in Politico.
“It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued,” Flake wrote. “To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.”
Flake explained that he understood why Republicans were ignoring the issues the Trump presidency created, saying he has done the same thing.
“I’ve been sympathetic to this impulse to denial, as one doesn’t ever want to believe that the government of the United States has been made dysfunctional at the highest levels, especially by the actions of one’s own party,” Flake continued.”… For a conservative, that’s an awfully bitter pill to swallow.”
One of the few ways to stop a way-ward president is through Congress, Flake said, before calling on his fellow congressmen to acts as the “checks and balances” against some of Trump’s demands.
“As the first branch of government (Article I), the Congress was designed expressly to assert itself at just such moments. It is what we talk about when we talk about ‘checks and balances.’ Too often, we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, ‘Someone should do something!’ without seeming to realize that that someone is us,” he went on.
Flake is up for re-election in 2018 and is currently in a vulnerable position due to weak poll numbers.
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