On Tuesday, Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who had just announced his retirement, delivered a stunning indictment of President Trump, and blasted members of his own party for failing to speak out against the president.
“None of this is normal,” Flake said. “And what do we, as United States senators, have to say about it? The principles that underlie our politics, the values of our founding, are too vital to our identity and survival to allow them to be compromised by the requirements of politics, because politics can make us silent when we should speak and silence can equal complicity.”
A full transcript of his speech follows:
At a moment when it seems that our democracy is more defined by our discord than by our own values and principles, let me note an obvious point: that these offices that we hold are not ours indefinitely. We are not here simply to mark time. Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office, and there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time.
It must also be said that I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret because of the state of our disunion, regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics. Regret because of the indecency of our discourse. Regret because of the coarseness of our leadership. Regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by our, I mean all of our complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end.
In this century, a new phrase has entered the language to describe the accommodation of a new and undesirable order, that phrase being the new normal. That we must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue with the tone set at the top. We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country. The personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, and the flagrant disregard for truth and decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have been elected to serve.
None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal. We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that that is just the way things are now. If we simply become inured to this condition, thinking that it is just politics as usual, then heaven help us. Without fear of the consequences and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal.
Reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous, and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy. Such behavior does not project strength, because our strength comes from our values. It, instead, projects a corruption of the spirit and weakness.
It is often said that children are watching. Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, why didn't you do something? Why didn't you speak up? What are we going to say? Mr. President, I rise today to say, enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalies never become the normal.
With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it.
We know better than that. By now, we all know better than that.
Here today I stand to say that we would be better served, we would better serve the country by better fulfilling our obligations under the Constitution by adhering to our Article 1 old normal, Mr. Madison's separation of powers. This genius affirmation which was argued held that the equal branches of our government would balance and counteract with each other, if necessary. Ambition counteracts ambition, he wrote. But what happens if ambition fails to counteract ambition and civility asserts itself in the face of chaos and instability and Dean decency fails to call out decency?
Would we accept such display from dominant Democrats? Of course we wouldn't, and we would be wrong if we did.
When we remain silent and fail to act, when we know that silence and inaction is the wrong thing to do because of political considerations, because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad nauseam, when there should be greater considerations and imperatives in defense of our institutions and our liberty, we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations. Those things are far more important than politics.
Now, I'm aware that there's a segment of my party that believes that anything short of complete and unquestioning loyalty to a president who belongs to my party is unacceptable and suspect.
If I have been critical, it is not because I relish criticizing the behavior of the president of the United States. If I have been critical, it is because I believe it is my obligation to do so, and as a matter of duty and conscience, the notion that one should stay silent and as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters, the notion that we should say or do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is a historic and profoundly misguided.
A president, a Republican president named Roosevelt, had this to say about the president and a citizen's relationship to the office. "The president is the most important among a large number of public servants and a degree warranted by his good or bad conduct, efficiency or inefficiency in disinterested service to the nation as a whole.”
He continued, “Therefore, it's absolutely necessary that there should be a full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude is both base and servile.”
President Roosevelt continued, "To announce that there be no criticism of a president or stand by a president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the public."
Loyalty to conscience and principles should supersede loyalty to any man or party. We can all be forgiven for failing in that measure from time to time. I certainly put myself at the top of the list of those who fall short in this regard. I am holier than none. But too often we rush to salvage principle, not to salvage principle but to forgive and excuse our failures so that we might accommodate them and go right on failing until the accommodation itself becomes our principle. In that way and over time, we can justify almost any behavior and sacrifice any principle. I am afraid that this is where we now find ourselves.
When a leader recognizes new hurt and goes to look for someone to blame, there is perhaps nothing more devastating to a society. Leadership knows that most often a good place to start in assigning blame is to look somewhat closer to home. Leadership knows where the buck stops.
Humility helps; character counts. Leadership does not encouragingly feed the base appetites in us, and leadership lives by the American creed. And American leadership looks to the world and just as Lincoln did, sees the family of man.
Humanity is not a zero-sum game. When we have been at our most prosperous, we have been at our most principled, and when we do well, the rest of the world does well. These articles of civic faith have been critical to the American identity as long as we have been alive.
They are our birthright and obligation. We must guard them jealously and pass them on for as long as the calendar has days. To betray them or to be unserious in their defense is a betrayal of the fundamental obligations of American leadership, and to behave as if they don't matter is simply not who we are.
Now the efficacy of American leadership around the globe has come into question. When the United States emerged from the World War II, we contributed about half of the world's economic activity, it would have been easy to secure our dominance keeping those countries who had been defeated or greatly weakened in the war in their place. We didn't do that. It would have been easy to focus inward. We resisted those impulses.
Instead, we financed reconstruction of shattered countries and created international organizations and institutions that have helped provide security and foster prosperity around the world for more than 70 years. Now it seems that we, the architects of this visionary rules-based world order that has brought so much freedom and prosperity, are the ones most eager to abandon it.
The implications of this abandonment are profound, and the beneficiaries of this rather radical departure in the American approach to the world are the ideological enemies of our values. Despotism loves a vacuum, and our allies are now looking elsewhere for leadership. Why are they doing this?
None of this is normal. And what do we, as United States senators, have to say about it? The principles that underlie our politics, the values of our founding, are too vital to our identity and survival to allow them to be compromised by the requirements of politics, because politics can make us silent when we should speak and silence can equal complicity.
So, Mr. President, I will not be complicit or silent. I've decided to better represent the people of Arizona and to better serve my country and conscience by freeing myself of the political consideration that consumed far too much bandwidth and cause me to compromise too many principles. To that end, I'm announcing today that my service in the Senate will conclude in early January 2019.
It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative, who believes in limited government and free markets, devoted to free trade, pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican Party, the party that has so long cared to find itself by the belief in those things. And it's clear to me for the moment that we have given in or given up on the core principles in favor of a more visceral anger and the moral mess that we've created are justified, but anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy. There is an undeniable potency to a populist appeal by mischaracterizing or misunderstanding our problems and giving in to the impulse to scapegoat and belittle — the impulse to scapegoat threatens to turn us into a fearful and backward-looking people. In the case of the Republican Party, those things also threaten to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking minority party.
We were not made great as a country by indulging in or exalting our worst impulses, turning against ourselves, glorifying in the things that divide us and calling fake things true and true things fake. And we did not become the beacon of freedom by clouding our institutions and failing to understand just how hard and vulnerable they are.
This spell will eventually break. That is my belief. We will return to ourselves once more, and I say the sooner the better. Because we have a healthy government, we must also have healthy and functioning parties.
We must respect each other again in an atmosphere of shared facts and shared values, comity and good faith. We must argue our positions fervently and never be afraid to compromise. We must assume the best of our fellow man and always look for the good. Until that day comes, we must be unafraid to speak out as if our country depends on it, because it does. I plan to spend the remaining 14 months of my Senate term doing just that.
Mr. President, the graveyard is full of indispensable men and women. None of us here is indispensable, nor were even the great history to shape the country that we've inherited. What is indispensable are the values that they consecrated in Philadelphia and in this place, values which will endure for so long as men and women wish to remain free. What is indispensable is what we do here in defense of those values. A political career does not mean much if we are complicit in undermining these values.
I thank my colleagues for indulging me here today. I will close by borrowing the words of President Lincoln, who knew more about preserving our founding values than any American who has ever lived. His words from his first inaugural were from a prayer of his time and now no less in ours: “We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of our affection.”
from Vox - All http://ift.tt/2i36jCb
Breaking News: “None of this is normal:” Read the full transcript of Sen. Jeff Flake’s blistering retirement speech - News Paper
0 komentar:
Post a Comment