No politician wants to read words like these, on fivethirtyeight.com.

Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is unpopular — really unpopular. According to a poll about all 100 senators released Tuesday by Morning Consult, just 37 percent of registered voters in Arizona approve of their junior senator, compared with 45 percent who disapprove. That gives Flake a net approval rating of -8 percentage points, the worst of any senator.

On Morning Consult, the headline of an article reads, Only One Senator Up for Re-Election in 2018 Has Underwater Approval Rating. Flake’s picture is above the headline. Ouch.

Compared to most politicians, Flake usually come off as a reasonably honest, forthright guy with a conscience—a conservative with moderate tendencies. He even got Trump riled up enough that our commander in chief said he’ll spend millions of dollars to primary out Flake—which is a plus for the senator in my book. But now, faced with his worst-in-the-nation numbers, Flake has thrown moderation and forthrightness to the winds. He’s tacking as far right as he can to fight off certain primary opposition. After that, he figures, he can flip over his political Etch-A-Sketch, give it a shake and put on his “sensible Republican” mantle for the general election.

The first big test for Republican senators is the upcoming health care legislation. Flake decided to throw in with far-right Senator Ted Cruz and support the “Consumer Freedom Option” he developed. Basically, Cruz says if insurance companies have one option that’s in line with the Obamacare rules, they should be able to create as many low cost, low coverage options as they like. Remember the subprime loan disaster? This is subprime health insurance. Consumers are sold insurance on the cheap, then when they need it, they find it’s all promises and no coverage. The plan is so bad, even insurance companies don’t like it. They know healthy people will flock to the low cost, low coverage insurance, and the Obamacare-compliant options will be chosen mostly by people in the greatest need of care—in other words, people with preexisting conditions. The cost of those plans will skyrocket, making them unaffordable to the people who need them most.

Flake brushes off the concern that people with preexisting conditions won’t be able to afford coverage with the most confused, convoluted statement I’ve heard from this generally plain-speaking guy.

“[I]f we’ve made the decision, and we have, that pre-existing conditions need to be covered and that that’s going to require a big subsidy, then it’s better to pay it outright through taxes than it is to put the burden on those who are paying premiums that can’t even utilize the insurance. … We’re not saying in any way that you don’t cover those with pre-existing conditions. It would just be a different funding mechanism than this cross-subsidization that happens right now. Because that leaves too many Arizonans either high and dry, without insurance because they can’t afford it, and they pay the fine, or with insurance that they can’t utilize.”

If you can, first, understand Flake’s word salad, then, second, figure out where he plans to find the money for that “different funding mechanism” he’s talking about, well, you’re a better person than Flake, because he clearly doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

Then there’s what may be an even bigger test for Republican senators: how to respond to the news about investigations into Trump’s Russia connections, which gets worse on a daily, sometimes an hourly, basis. The latest problem is the meeting where Donald Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort sat down with a Russian lawyer after being told the Russian government wanted to help out the Trump campaign. John McCain has been pretty open in his condemnation of the meeting, but then again, McCain isn’t up for reelection for a few years. Flake, on the other hand, feels Arizona’s far right, “My Trump right or wrong” faction breathing down his neck. He doesn’t dare alienate them. So he opted to wimp out.

“There is a bipartisan Senate committee and a special counsel looking into that. I am sure they’ll get to the bottom of it,” Flake said in a written statement.

Flake could have saved himself 21 words by simply writing, “No comment.”

Flake is running right, because he’s running scared. And a few Democrats, sensing his panic, are preparing to throw their hats in the senatorial ring. Stay tuned.

This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2017.

17 replies on “Flake Takes a Turn To the Right”

  1. How the heck is not supporting Obamacare a “turn to the right” especially for a Republican?
    Remember pre-existing conditions weren’t even covered as recently as 8 years ago. I know that’s a long time to remember for an American.

  3. Republicare (not Trumpcare (it’s too confusing for the bewildered president) is the definitive guide to the party’s complete incompetence. For seven plus years congressional Republicans have decried Obamacare (Obama actually studied and understood the issues and worked overtime to see the ACA passed).

    Now with ownership of both chambers and the executive branch, Republicans fume and fuss and fail, exposing their dedication to breaking things with absolutely no idea of how to fix what they wish to destroy. Flake? He can be counted among the spineless enablers of Trump voting in favor of patently unfit cabinet appointees including the Insane Clown Posse of DeVos, Perry, Sessions, Carson and a gaggle of dimwits dedicated to tearing down the departments they now lead.

    That said, this is not an endorsement of the opposition.

    The Democrats are in the same death spiral of irrelevance as the Republicans. In the not too distant future, a majority (not just today’s plurality) of voters will no longer associate themselves with either of the political parties constituting our duopoly. Under that circumstance, the question will reverberate “Who are these people and why are they dominating our electoral process when, collectively, they represent so few of us?”

    Our Constitution, with its protections and checks and balances, will survive but it will be a grand day when we bid adieu to the calcified political parties which exist only for their own benefit and represent so few of their constituents.

    Tyrannosaurus, meet Brontosaurus. See you in the tar pits.

  4. Yes, David, by all means let’s get rid of any Republican willing to criticize Trump and / or work in a bipartisan fashion on any issue.
    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/politics/do-republicans-who-criticize-trump-face-peril-jeff-flake-is-about-find-out/2017/05/31/040f0586-4597-11e7-a196-a1bb629f64cb_story.html

    Perhaps the Pima County “Democrats” can capitalize on the opportunity the weakening of an anti-Trump Republican provides to ram someone in their “in” network into the position. (Or, more likely, in return for whatever trouble Safier takes to mock and undermine Flake we’ll get another Republican, but one more rigorously partisan and more aligned with the Trump agenda.)

    Hurray for Safier and his friends! What fun for them, at least up until the day the votes are counted, when they may find that they’ll get a nasty surprise similar to the surprise they got when they took down Huppenthal and it produced a Douglas win, not a Garcia win.

  6. It’s time for this vacuous Ken-doll to be retired to the dustbin of political history.

  7. Until Flake actually casts a vote against something Trump wants (we’re still waiting) his willingness to criticize Trump is empty rhetoric. He can wring his hands all he wants, but it’s pure posturing. He’s about as much of an anti-Trump Republican as is Mitch McConnell.

  8. It is especially disappointing to see our Senators from Arizona lacking courage in speaking out against the BCRA. Both the senate bill and its corresponding house version will undercut the Medicaid expansion. Arizonans know first-hand what happened when Jan Brewer slashed our budgets and kicked a ton of people off of Medicaid – there was a surge of patients who lost access to their outpatient doctors and crowded our emergency departments. These patients not only had their chronic diseases spin out of control because the loss of their insurance meant loss of medications and doctor visits – but they were subject to hospital admissions that were in many cases preventable.

    When Governor Brewer accepted the Medicaid expansion we got over 100,000 Arizonans insured the first year. Our own state’s history demonstrates why this experiment should NOT be repeated at the national level. Not only would we see a surge in patients losing their insurance, but we’d have a glut of them showing up again to our emergency departments when their chronic diseases again spun out of control. However, if we dismantle ACA at the federal level, there’s no higher level of government to bail AZ out (or any of the other states for that matter).

    We already know the GOP plan doesn’t work because we’ve lived it in Arizona. Changes to strengthen ACA are needed, but we neither need to return to the pre-2009 crisis that precipitated ACA. We need to learn from our own history, and use it to teach the rest of the nation as well.

  9. I think Flake would benefit from promoting a single payer system, he could improve his ratings with his constituents and possibly retain his senate seat in 2018, but the Koch brothers would not approve, that $$$$ would no longer exist for him. The choice is public approval or $$$?

  11. The ‘right turn’ is nothing new. All year long Flake’s messages have been reminding people of his extremely high ratings from such radical right organizations as the NRA. How’s this make you think of him?

    Sen. Flake’s lifetime scores with some of the country’s leading government watchdog organizations:

    NRA A+
    National Taxpayers’ Union A
    National Right to Life 99%
    Americans for Prosperity 98%
    Club for Growth 97%
    Citizens vs Government Waste 97%
    FreedomWorks 95%
    American Conservative Union 94%

  12. It’s Flake’s choice to be just another faceless tool of the rich on the lockstepping GOP Death Panel. But he could become something of a heroic rogue merely by jumping ship on the health bill – you know, doing the humane thing for millions of Americans. People are suckers for Republicans who even rarely do the decent thing. There are still people who think McCain is a rebel. And all he had to do was some unexpectedly decent comment, or even more rarely -a decent vote – every few years.

  13. Meanwhile he has heightened security and private security guards at his Tucson office. He sees people one person at s time – escorted by guards and uses cars to block off parking.

  14. Looks like the Republican health care bill has just failed because two Republican Senators refused to support it:
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/us/politics/health-care-overhaul-collapses-as-two-republican-senators-defect.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

    We need to move away from gridlock, not descend deeper into it. Those who look at every Republican who inclines toward bipartisan compromises as a weak member of the herd and join extremists in the opposing party to try to take centrists down are only exacerbating a situation in which our representatives must refuse, in order to survive politically, to work together for the common good.

  15. We would have been better served if they had maintained gridlock when the Dems forced the ACA through, saying “pass it and then you can see what’s in the bill.”

    Has that person (Pelosi) been replaced? No. We need Democrats that will join Republicans to replace the flawed law. But they are busy chasing Russian dreams of impeachment. And the country be damned. Very selfish of them.

  16. Hey, Dan Sorenson, I hope you noticed that if McCain hadn’t cast the tie breaking vote on the “skinny repeal,” the ACA would be gone now.

    Turns out those moderate Republicans are good for something now and then after all.

    But by all means, go ahead and follow Safier down the primrose path of chiseling out every moderate Republican, hoping to replace them with a Democrat in a red state where it is much more likely you’ll exchange them for a deeper shade of red.

  17. “And a few Democrats, sensing his panic, are preparing to throw their hats in the senatorial ring. Stay tuned.”

    I’m sure Flake is terrified. Wonder when those courageous Democrats will be stepping forward (before or after the election?) embracing the party’s forceful enunciation of its “Better Meal” of weak broth, thin gruel and warm lemonade.

    Reminds me of Roy Orbison’s “Running Scared.”

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