Arizona Senator Jeff Flake has just earned a primary challenge in 2018 because of his efforts to undermine the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nominee.
Former Arizona state senator Kelli Ward announced on Wednesday that she will challenge Flake, whom she described as a “big government globalist,” in 2018. In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Ward said:
“The #NeverTrump movement led by Sen. Jeff Flake has been an appalling example of power gone awry to the detriment of our country. We have a chance to elect a successful businessman with a plan to lead our country and Mr. Flake just can’t get on board. He’d rather have another DC insider with a known history of corruption at the helm.
Flake has claimed that he is not a member of #NeverTrump, even though he now says he will not vote for Donald Trump and has spent months undermining the Republican nominee’s candidacy.
Ward continued:
Regardless of the results of the presidential election, it will take more than one election cycle to drain the swamp of big government globalists like Mr. Flake. I’m willing to work hard to make sure that Arizona has real independent Republican representation. I will need the help of all of the voters out there who want to make America great again. The only way we change DC is by changing the people we send there.
The Washington Post reported in August that Flake goes out of his way to tell Arizona voters how much he “despises” the Republican nominee and has been “openly hopeful” about the prospect of working with a Clinton-Kaine administration.
“Even when no one asks him about Donald Trump, Sen. Jeff Flake makes sure the audience knows how much he despises the Republican presidential nominee,” The Washington Post reported.
“He’s now openly hopeful about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Congress if she defeats Trump, boasting about his close friendship with her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) […] He told reporters that he has ‘communicated’ with Kaine since the nomination and believes he could be an emissary for bipartisan deals in the Capitol during a Clinton administration.”
Flake suggested that everyday voters, who express frustrations at Republican rallies with chants about what they see as Clinton’s criminality, are “crazy conspiracy” theorists, according to the Washington Post report.
Flake has also seemingly encouraged his colleagues who endorsed Trump to consider abandoning their support for the Republican nominee.
When Trump questioned the objectivity of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, a member of La Raza Lawyers of San Diego, Flake suggested his colleagues use the media’s pile-on as an “opportunity” and an “off-ramp” from supporting Trump.
“I think there will come a time where you simply can’t support him [Trump] anymore. That time came for me a while ago. There’s always hope that he could change, but that hope is diminishing. So I do think this is a perfect opportunity, the off-ramp that [Sen.] Lindsey Graham talked about,” Flake said.
Throughout the race, Flake has made clear that his opposition to Trump stems in large part from Trump’s policy positions. Indeed, on some of the most significant policy issues facing the nation today, Flake sides with Clinton over Trump and the American electorate. Most notably, both Flake and Clinton are proponents of the open borders trade and immigration policies supported by globalist corporate donors.
“I want our Republican nominee to succeed,” Flake told Politico in July, but “not with the positions he has taken.”
Many of the positions where Flake has expressed opposition to Trump are issues where Flake’s vision is opposed by the vast majority of the Republican electorate—and the American electorate at large.
Flake recently argued that Congress should “suck up” and ratify President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement despite the fact that American public overwhelmingly objects to deal.
In fact, public opposition to the deal was so great that Hillary Clinton–who, like Flake, had been a vocal proponent of the deal– was forced to rhetorically distance herself from it throughout the campaign.
Arizona suffered a net loss of 21,000 jobs in 2015 alone due to the U.S. trade deficit with TPP countries, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Arizona lost more than a quarter of all of its manufacturing jobs since China entered the WTO– which was negotiated by Bill Clinton and supported by Hillary.
According to a recent POLITICO Pro-Harvard poll, 85 percent of Republicans believe that so-called “free trade” has lost more U.S. jobs than it has created. Only a vanishing 8 percent of Republicans believe that so-called “free trade” has led to higher wages for U.S. workers.
Yet during a July interview with Business Insider, Sen. Flake defended Bill Clinton’s controversial legacy on trade insisting, “NAFTA is not a dirty word.”
Polling data suggests otherwise. By a nearly two-to-one margin, voters said that they agree with Trump and believe that NAFTA “is the worst trade deal in modern American history, and that TPP is almost as bad,” according to a recent Breitbart/Gravis poll.
Hillary Clinton supported NAFTA, the WTO, and China’s entrance into the WTO. Like Flake, Clinton has a long record of supporting the TPP. As Bloomberg reported in 2013, Hillary Clinton took on a “leading part in drafting the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” CNN has reported that Clinton is on the record as having praised or promoted the TPP at least 45 times.
Trump has repeatedly warned American voters that if Clinton is elected President, she will “immediately approve” the TPP.
Similarly on the issue of immigration, Sen. Flake, who supports dramatically expanding immigration levels beyond all known historical precedent, has repeatedly opposed Trump’s calls for immigration controls.
In July, the Arizona Senator insisted that Trump’s plan to secure the southern border was not “advisable”.
“To think that we’d have a wall like Donald Trump is talking about across our 225-mile border with Mexico from California to Texas isn’t very feasible, nor advisable,” the Gang of Eight Senator said.
Flake has also expressed his opposition to Trump’s proposal to temporarily pause Muslim migration– despite the fact that polls show a majority of the Republican electorate supports it.
Flake described Trump’s desire to pause the large-scale importation of Islamic migrants— some of whom may support anti-American ideologies that are incompatible with Western values— as “lunacy,” and “just awful, frankly.”
“Just when you think he can’t stoop any lower, he manages to do so,” Flake said in December after Trump announced the proposal. “He won’t be the nominee.”
In response to Trump’s proposal, Flake decided to support a Democrat-backed amendment that essentially codified the claim that foreign nationals have a global right to immigrate into the United States—a principle which Clinton’s campaign recently indicated she similarly supports.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, who opposed the amendment, explained that it would “constitute a transformation of our immigration system. In effect, it is a move toward the ratification of the idea that global migration is a ‘human right’, and a civil right… and that these so-called ‘immigrants’ rights’ must be supreme to the rights of sovereign nations to determine who can and cannot enter their borders.”
Yet Flake’s longstanding support for expanding immigration levels is well documented.
Most notably, in 2013, as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, Flake worked with Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Chuck Schumer to pass President Obama’s immigration agenda. The bill, which would have granted amnesty to the illegal population “on day one” of its enactment, would have also massively expanded immigration levels—dispensing 33 million green cards to foreign nationals in the span of a single decade.
Similarly in January of 2015, Flake joined Rubio in co-sponsoring an extreme immigration expansion bill—known as the I-Squared Act. The bill would have allowed for a virtually unlimited expansion of Muslim immigration and of college graduates into the United States.
Critics of the 2015 bill argued that its massive expansion of the controversial H-1B program would hurt American workers and would allow employers to replace them with lower-wage foreign workers.
However, this might not be much of a concern for Sen. Flake. In 2015, Flake voted to confirm Attorney General Loretta Lynch after she had made clear her belief that an American worker is no more entitled to an American job than is any foreign national who is able to cross the border illegally.
“I believe the right and the obligation to work is one that is shared by everyone in this country, regardless of how they came here,” Lynch said when asked whether American citizens and lawful immigrants already here have more of a right to a U.S. job than illegal immigrants.
Flake chose to support Lynch even after she had expressed her support for Obama’s executive action to nullify and suspend U.S. immigration law.
However, this is perhaps not surprising given that Flake did not take a firm stand in fighting President Obama’s executive amnesty. In fact, as Townhall reported last year in an article entitled, “Jeff Flake Aides Democrat Efforts To Rubber Stamp Obama’s Amnesty”:
“Sen. Jeff Flake sided with Senate Democrats Wednesday, pleading with Senate Republicans to abandon their effort to check President Obama’s constitutional overreach, and instead rubber stamp his executive amnesty.”
The article notes that in a Senate speech, Flake said that Republicans should not “poke the president in the eye” by using Congress’ power of the purse to stop Obama’s executive overreach.
Flake eventually went on to vote for executive amnesty by opposing efforts to deny funding for President Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty in DHS appropriations, and supporting a proposal that would provide full and unrestricted funding for the unconstitutional amnesty.
For years, Flake has also been a defender of open borders. In 2014, Flake defended Jeb Bush’s declaration that illegal immigration is “an act of love”.
“In a four-paragraph statement posted on Facebook, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said Bush deserves praise for his comments, saying: ‘I agree with Jeb, and I applaud him for having the guts to say it,’” Politico reported at the time.
Flake praised Bush for speaking “so humanely and unapologetically about the motivations” of illegal immigrants— writing that while “some come with intent to do harm or simply take advantage of our generosity… many come to find work to feed their families. To lump everyone who crosses the border illegally into the same class is unfair and unproductive.”
According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, illegal immigration costs Arizona taxpayers roughly $2.6 billion annually.
In 1960, two years before Jeff Flake was born, the foreign born population of his home state of Arizona was 70,000. By 2013, there were nearly one million foreign-born residents in Arizona (896,310), which represents a population larger than the size of San Francisco.
This transformation was largely the result of a 1965 immigration bill, which lifted Calvin Coolidge’s immigration caps and opened up American immigration visas to the entire world. The bill resulted in an explosion of America’s foreign-born population from 9.6 million in 1965 to roughly 45 million today.
Today, as a result of our federal immigration policies, the U.S. admits more immigrants in a single year than there are Jeff Flake voters in all of Arizona.
Yet Flake has pushed policies to make that figure even larger, despite the fact that 92 percent of the GOP electorate, and 83 percent of the American electorate overall, would like to see immigration levels frozen or reduced.
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