Not Flake Either ... Yet.

I just listened to Senator Jeff Flake's speech on a free press from the Senate floor addressed to Trump. I admire him greatly for that. Somebody has needed to put it out there, and he did it eloquently. I'm just a tad concerned that he'll be running to replace Trump in the next election. Sounds like a good deed getting punished, eh?

So, why my concern?

I first heard of Flake well before I moved down here. MPR aired a segment on an interview with him, one of those you do when a new Senator or somebody of like ilk needs to be introduced to the rest of the country. I was prepared to despise him before I heard the first word. After all, Arizona? Republican? It seemed an invitation to just another right wing extremist. Despite myself, I found him thoughtful and often reasonable - about the highest praise I could give a Republican back then. Or now, even more so. Even considering my sometimes-respect and sometimes-tolerance for the decisions of (now) our ex-POW Senator McCain.

While Flake often sounded good, his voting record still has too often been further to the right than his avowed stance on issues. So there is something of a trust issue for me. But the combination of that and the party affiliation are not the only reasons I would oppose the rumored political ambitions of Senator Flake. After all, there will be a pendulum swinging both directions in the future, and his time may very well come after a while. He is fairly young, after all. And right now he can appear to be one of the better of the possible choices on the political map of possible right wing candidates.

But first, the political pendulum has swung so far to the right of mainstream Americans that it has to swing back first. I mean, really, REALLY has to. The constant barrage of extremism and crazy have become normalized. We can't go any further down that path and remain a real democracy. We barely are one now.

One Republican candidate who is a little more sane than Trump is not going to cut it. Stepping 6" back from the edge of the cliff is not enough to be safe from falling off the edge. We need to move a mile back and sit there a bit before that pendulum heads back again. In other words, the Republicans need to lose. Not a whisker's worth, where one or two losses from election or resignation would shove us right back to the cliff's edge, but by a firm and decisive margin that would teach the Republicans that they can't serve this country and its people by letting the most extreme of the extreme control them. They need to become aware again that negotiation and compromise between parties, or even within their own, are the way to serve the most Americans in the best way. (I'm going to be kind, and against my inclinations give them the benefit of the doubt that at least some part of why they are there is to accomplish that, not just gain power and riches.)

The "Hastert Rule" has to go. For those of you not familiar with that term, back when Dennis Hastert was Speaker of the House, he started a policy whereby any legislation that couldn't win on a vote within his own (Republican) party members adding up to a majority of the total House, and thus not needing any input whatsoever from Democrats or Independents, would not even make it to the floor for a vote. If it wasn't a forgone conclusion, all their way, nothing would happen. A whole lot of  nothing did.

Just for a comparison, when it was time to pass the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, input and amendments from both sides were a part of the process. The basic idea was a Republican one. No, they will have you believe it was way too socialist and left wing to ever come from their party, but it was originally Bob Dole's plan. It wound up not being ideal for either party, but despite all the noise and disparaging hype, it was the best possible advancement politically possible at the time. Also it was the best policy for the whole of the country, not just a few, possible at the time. Of course, the "poison pill" amendments inserted by Republicans and accepted by Democrats in the hope of not just starting the process, but making corrections as we went along, haven't helped. A Congress swinging more right and refusing to actually improve anything, working instead on sabotaging the whole idea, haven't helped either.

That's just one example of why the pendulum needs to swing left again. Wa-a-a-ay left. So: not Jeff Flake. Not yet anyway.