OPINION:
As the images and sounds (mostly whining) on cable news and the Facebook/Twitter posts attest, there are people — probably some very nice people — who think of themselves as principled conservatives and who irately defend Sen. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, as one of them.
He is, they have convinced themselves, just another principled conservative who took it in the shins from hard-right meanies who forced him into announcing he won’t seek a second term next year.
Well, he is a principled conservative and he isn’t a principled conservative.
What is principled to some, like sealing our southern border before discussing possible paths to amnesty, is unprincipled to others, such as those who think immigration is unqualifiedly good and should have no limits based on skills, education, country of origin or religious beliefs.
One kind of conservative thinks it’s not OK to grant U.S. citizenship to someone who swears allegiance to, say, Shariah law or to single-party governance and who disdains the U.S. Constitution and its prohibition against a single official religion or forced servitude.
Another kind of conservative thinks American soil is meant to — and must be — the foundation for a marketplace of ideas. Sounds noble enough to be a Founding Father’s statement. It’s not. Because it’s not quite nuanced enough.
A crowded marketplace of ideas is not meant to be — and must not be — a site where you can shout “fire!” in a crowd. Nor a place where you swear to uphold the Constitution but under your breath demand the legal right to surgically mutilate little girls’ genitals or to teach children that the people who don’t follow the one and only religion must convert or be killed.
Certainly Mr. Flake, even in his deepest libertarian mood, doesn’t condone shouting fire in a crowded theater (or Apple store) or sexual mutilation for religious or any other reason.
But is he the kind of conservative who holds that the right to decide who comes to our shores is paramount? Or is he the kind who doesn’t hold that right as sacred? The latter, I think his words and deeds show.
In at least one area, Mr. Flake sees a principle as doubtedlessly conservative, even while the rest of the conservative world thinks otherwise. The right to keep and bear arms and the obligation to fend off sly attempts to weaken that right, encroachment by encroachment, is paramount to some conservatives but not to others.
The junior senator from Arizona began flaking off conservatives within the first four months of his first year in the Senate by trying to nibble off a bit. Together with liberal Republican Sen. Susan M. Collins of Maine, Mr. Flake led a bipartisan clutch of senators in an attempt to empower the attorney general to deep-six a gun-purchase application from anyone on a no-fly list or on another kind of list — one that identifies people subject to extra scrutiny.
The problem for anyone concerned about preserving civil liberties — as you would think a libertarian-minded senator would be — is that lists that government (or industry) bureaucracies create can have people on them that shouldn’t be and not have people on them who should be. And can have people whom the government targets for reasons other than suspicion of terrorist inclinations.
No, not even our government is above reproach. No, big government is not your all-loving mother. The government’s no-fly list is, for example, the government’s secret and, therefore, particularly vulnerable to abuse.
The liberal American Civil Liberties Union a few years ago filed a legal challenge on behalf of 15 people, some U.S. citizens and others legal permanent residents, who said the government improperly barred them from flying. Sen. Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, was kept off a commercial flight because his name was on the no-fly list — or so the news media reported at the time; the Transportation Safety Administration later denied it happened.
The principles of libertarian conservatism should have warned Mr. Flake against this and later attempts to trust government to infringe on gun rights or other rights.
Over the couple of days, leftists posing as neutral observers (otherwise known as the American press) and the left posing as the right (e.g., Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin) made of Mr. Flake a Mr. Principles in analyzing his nationally televised “I’m too good to be in a Senate tainted by Donald Trump” speech. (For the record, Mr. Trump is not in the Senate.)
“Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) delivered a stirring call to action in the Senate against a president who has proved himself unfit to govern,” Ms. Rubin wrote.
What does she recommend Republicans do about all this?
“First, some conservatives with a conscience can choose to run as third-party candidates to continue their fight against a Trumpified GOP,” she wrote.
Excellent. A Rubin-Flake presidential ticket. Perfect antidote to Trumpism. If the pair prevails, Vice President Flake will be able to vote in the Senate now and then, as its members playfully toss snowballs in that hell of an outcome.
⦁ Ralph Z. Hallow, the chief political correspondent of commentary, served on the Chicago Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Washington Times editorial boards, was Ford Foundation Fellow in Urban Journalism at Northwestern University and resident at Columbia University Editorial-Page Editors Seminar.
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