Tag: Jeff Flake

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Jeff Flake Asks For FBI Investigation Before Full Senate Vote On Kavanaugh

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona asked colleagues to delay full vote on Brett Kavanaugh
Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona asked colleagues to delay full vote on Brett Kavanaugh

Supreme Court hopeful Judge Brett “Skippy” Kavanaugh saw his nomination approved out of committee to a full floor vote in the Senate along a party line vote of 11-10.

However, GOP Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona told his colleagues, “I’ll move it out of committee, but I will only be comfortable moving forward on the floor until the FBI has done more investigation than it has done already.”

Shortly before the committee vote, a woman stopped Flake in an elevator and shared her own story of sexual assault.

The dramatic, emotional moment went viral.

From The Daily Beast:

“It was all kind of a blur,” Gallagher recalled in an interview with The Daily Beast. “We all ran after him. We held open the elevator and I just started telling him why it was important and what had happened to me and why he should not let Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.”

What followed was an excruciating exchange that lasted only five minutes in time but could, just maybe, change the course of history. After another woman, Ana Maria Archila, admonished Flake for supporting Kavanaugh, Gallagher jumped in.

“I was sexually assaulted and nobody believed me,” she said. “I didn’t tell anyone, and you’re telling all women that they don’t matter.”

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Republican Sen. Jeff Flake Announces He Won’t Seek Re-Election Due To Trump’s “Reckless, Outrageous, Undignified Behavior”

Sen. Jeff Flake, Republican senator from Arizona, just gave a breathtaking speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate announcing he will not seek re-election in 2018.

In doing so, he pointed to the “reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior” of Donald Trump as president.

Flake pretty much left it all out on the Senate floor as he called out the president as well as calling his fellow senators “complicit” in allowing Donald Trump to continue to debase the office of the presidency.

Read the full speech here, and watch excerpts below.

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Sen. Jeff Flake: Republicans Should Have Stood Up Against The “Birther” Movement

GOP Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona

Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, out hawking his new book, appeared on NBC’s Meet The Press this morning demonstrating a new found sense of political courage.

Speaking to host Chuck Todd, Flake shared that he wished more GOP folks had opposed some of the uglier incidents in recent politics, like Donald Trump’s “birther” conspiracy which claimed President Obama was not born in the United States.

“Well, I do think that we’ve seen more people ready to stand up. And I wish that we, as a party, would have stood up, for example, when the birtherism thing was going along. A lot of people did stand up but not enough,” said Flake.

Flake also now denounces the calls of “lock her up”  regarding Hillary Clinton at Trump campaign rallies last year.

It’s nice to look reasonable now, but where was this sense of political ethics last year?

Watch Flake explain himself to Todd below.

(h/t JoeMyGod)

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GOP Sen. Jeff Flake: “My Party Is In Denial About Donald Trump”

Excerpted from his new book, Conscience of a Conservative, Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona goes all in deconstructing and taking responsibility for the process that gave rise to a President Trump.

Via Politico:

I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure.

It was we conservatives who, upon Obama’s election, stated that our No. 1 priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making Obama a one-term president—the corollary to this binary thinking being that his failure would be our success and the fortunes of the citizenry would presumably be sorted out in the meantime.

It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us.

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. 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.

[snip]

For a conservative, that’s an awfully bitter pill to swallow. So as I layered in my defense mechanisms, I even found myself saying things like, “If I took the time to respond to every presiden­tial tweet, there would be little time for anything else.” Given the volume and velocity of tweets from both the Trump campaign and then the White House, this was certainly true.

But it was also a monumental dodge. It would be like Noah saying, “If I spent all my time obsessing about the coming flood, there would be little time for anything else.” At a certain point, if one is being honest, the flood becomes the thing that is most worthy of attention.

At a certain point, it might be time to build an ark.

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Sixteen Year-Old Schools Sen. Jeff Flake On Planned Parenthood

Sen. Jeff Flake – Photo: Gage Skidmore

A 16-year-old from Tucson, Arizona, schools Republican Sen. Jeff Flake:

“I’m wondering, as a Planned Parenthood patient, and someone who relies on Title X, who you are clearly not – why is it your right to take away my right to choose Planned Parenthood?”

(h/t Boy Culture)

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US Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona urges veto of “License to discriminate” bill

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona tweeted his support for a veto of anti-gay SB-1062 which recently passed in the Arizona legislature.

The bill would allow individuals to discriminate against LGBT persons on the basis of “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

I’m hoping Gov. Jan Brewer is listening.

And I’m waiting for Sen. John McCain to chime in.

The bill is not only anti-gay, but it’s anti-business and sends a bad message to the world that “certain people” aren’t welcome in the state.

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Arizona Senator Jeff Flake’s son uses homophobic, anti-semitic language on Twitter

Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) apologized today after offensive statements on his teenage son’s social media accounts were uncovered by Buzzfeed.

Sen. Jeff Flake’s high school-aged son Tanner used twitter to threaten the “faggot” who stole his bike that he “will find you, and … will beat the crap out of you,” joked about an acquaintance stealing one-liners because he’s Jewish, and went by the name “n1ggerkiller” in an online game.

Another message said “I’m down to own some faggots.”

Said Flake to Buzzfeed:

“I’m very disappointed in my teenage son’s words, and I sincerely apologize for the insensitivity. This language is unacceptable, anywhere. Needless to say, I’ve already spoken with him about this, he has apologized, and I apologize as well.”

Flake’s son’s YouTube comments contain the same slurs, and also “called Mexicans the ‘scum of the Earth’ and on several occasions bragged that his father is a member of Congress. Here are a few more samples of Tanner Flakes YouTube comments:

“you faggot retard pussy piece of crap i hope you die in a hole slowly and painfully”
“you gay fag ni**er go shoot yourself because no body likes you”
“Mexicans are the scum of the earth.”
“Then some ni**er started rapping and I looked at her album art and saw that it was Flo Rida.”
“IT’S THE NI**ER FAMILY!!!!”
“Stupid little ni**er”
“go die in a hole you stupid ni**er”
“The black guy always fails first…”
“Yes, because one white dude goes nuts. No. Black people do crap like this all of the time.”
“When he called himself a cheap jew i loled hard”

Find more examples over on Buzzfeed.

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Sen. Jeff Flake: A GOP Presidential candidate who supports marriage equality is “inevitable”

During an appearance on Meet The Press, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake said that he felt it was inevitable that there would one day be a GOP presidential candidate, and that he or she would receive wide support:

CHUCK TODD (HOST): Let me ask you on gay marriage. Could you support a Republican presidential candidate some day who supported same-sex marriage?

FLAKE: Oh, I think that’s inevitable. There will be one and he will receive bipartisan support — or she will. So I think that yes, the answer is yes.

TODD: And where are you on this issue, you say it’s inevitable. Are you — Lisa Murkowski, a Republican colleague of yours called it evolving on the issue. Are you evolving to use her words on this issue?

FLAKE: I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman I still hold to the traditional definition of marriage.

TODD: Is there something that you — are you thinking about it? Can you imagine changing your position before you left the U.S. Senate?

FLAKE: I can’t. I tell you, in the past I’ve supported repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I’ve supported the [The Employment] Nondiscrimination Act as well, but I hold to the traditional definition of marriage.

Although support for marriage equality has risen at an amazing rate across all demographics, I think it will be a while before the GOP actually chooses a presidential candidate who supports same-sex marriage.

I appreciate Sen. Flake’s support on ENDA and the repeal of DADT, but he clearly could use a little more “evolution” on the topic of marriage equality.

(source)