Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) is acting like a spoiled teenager.

In the midst of the Democrats’ grandstanding and obstruction over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, Flake — who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee — decided to go to Africa for three weeks in order to further stall Kavanaugh’s confirmation process.

Mitch McConnell cancelled the August recess specifically to ensure that Kavanaugh is confirmed as soon as possible despite Democrat obstruction. But Flake’s last-minute sabbatical means he will be absent when the Senate reconvenes this month.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is vital to the confirmation process. With Flake absent, the Senate Judiciary Committee can’t function, which means Kavanaugh can’t get confirmed.

Meanwhile, Flake has been trying unsuccessfully all summer to get a vote on restricting President Trump’s ability to impose tariffs. He apparently thinks holding Kavanaugh’s confirmation process hostage is the way to go about getting it.

Why is he doing this?

Because Flake is mad. Really, really mad.

He’s mad that President Trump’s tariffs are finally putting American workers first before the interests of globalists. Flake doesn’t like the President’s tariffs because he wants globalization and its accompanying evisceration of the American working and middle classes to continue unhindered.

This is hardly the first time that Jeff Flake has let his personal hatred of President Trump and his policies influence him to help Democrats subvert the America First agenda.

Flake attacked President Trump’s travel ban and pushed a Senate resolution condemning President Trump after his summit with Vladimir Putin.

When Flake announced his retirement back in October 2017, he gave a speech on the Senate floor that was little more than a thinly-veiled tirade against President Trump. This was followed up by a self-congratulatory — and self-serving — op-ed in the liberal New York Times in which he implied the President is a danger to our society.

In that melodramatic screed, Flake wrote that, “[a]s a conservative, I do not seek conflict with the president of the United States.” Interesting considering he wrote an entire book — Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle — criticizing President Trump and the movement that sent him to the White House.

But if Flake is a conservative, he’s a terrible one with a long record of betraying traditionally conservative principles.

In 2007, Flake introduced his own amnesty bill that provided illegal aliens a pathway to citizenship — a mockery of our immigration laws and a gross insult to all the immigrants who came here legally.

In 2013, he joined the treacherous Gang of Eight to push amnesty yet again.

Flake also supported President Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with the brutal communist dictatorship in Cuba.

The Senator’s past establishment positions and pathological obsession with removing President Trump’s tariffs proves that the only thing Flake the “conservative” truly cares about conserving is the power of the establishment elites.

Senator Flake is the living embodiment of everything that has gone wrong with the GOP and the conservative movement in the last 30 years — everything President Trump is fixing.

For too long, politicians like Flake have claimed the conservative mantle while doing absolutely nothing to conserve Americans’ traditional way of life. No longer.

Jeff Flake is a dinosaur — and it’s time for him and other Never Trumpers to go extinct.

Tom Tancredo is a former U.S. representative for Colorado’s Sixth Congressional District.