Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) faced a raucous and often combative town hall Thursday night, when he fielded questions well past the event’s planned ending from constituents who seemed to know he faces re-election in less than two years.
“Health care for all!” chants began before the event even started, the Arizona Republic reported. And it didn’t let up from there.
Maximum capacity crowd at #flaketownhall chant, “Health care for all” pic.twitter.com/yPGlwwn1jn
— Indivisible AZ 5 (@IndivisibleAZ5) April 14, 2017
Well this escalated quickly… #FlakeTownHall #12News pic.twitter.com/1P2z3vyTXK
— Ryan Cody (@RyanThomasCody) April 14, 2017
Flake had set out rules for the town hall ahead of time, including that signs and other “objects that create a disturbance” would not be allowed in. Many attendees brought red and green sheets of paper to indicate their agreement instead.
The first-term senator answered questions on everything from gun rights to single-payer health care, to perhaps predictable protests.
“I will continue to support, as much as I can, our free-market system of health care,” he said at one point, per the Arizona Republic. “[S]orry we have a disagreement about this” he said in response to questions about Planned Parenthood funding.
The pseudo-filibuster of former President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, he said to boos, was “not without precedent.”
Asked about President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall, the Washington Examiner reported, Flake said it “doesn’t have to be a wall all the way through Texas and Arizona,” contradicting the President’s stance.
Still, he was largely deferential to the President’s prerogatives. Pressured on the mounting costs of Trump’s near-constant weekend travel, according to Business Insider, the senator said he wasn’t “going to to tell the President where he can and cannot spend his weekends.”
“That’s something we’ll deal with when we deal with the budget,” he said.
Flake ended up extending the event an hour past its 8:30 p.m. deadline. At one point a school counselor asked him to stand up for common decency in the face of a President often seemingly lacking it.
“For the first time I’ve had to go to classrooms to deal with the Trump effect,” she said. “I’m horrified by students who are feeling harassed because they are disenfranchised. I need strong leaders in Washington, D.C., and in my state to stand up, especially as a white man, to protect my students by saying, ‘This is not allowed. This is not allowed.’”
The event received plenty of attention from Democratic and progressive groups as well.
The Democratic National Committee reportedly sent emails asking supporters to “get in Jeff Flake’s grill.”
“Cash in your retirement folks…the world’s about to end,” Indivisible Arizona wrote on its Facebook page when the event was announced Monday. “Senator Jeff Flake is holding a real-life, in-person, town hall.”
Flake is not nearly as bad as some of the others, but I can’t underscore enough the nerve, the audacity, of these hosers cooperating in an unprecedented assault on political and societal norms and yet feeling justified in tut-tutting their constituents and lecturing them about courtesy and politeness!
And all the while not even answering the questions put to them!
Mrs. Von Holst told me that Flake will not hold any Town Halls in Tucson, which is quite blue. The response here would be even more vocal. Flake is dubbed a ‘moderate’ Republican by the gullible media desperate to find ‘normal’ GOP legislators. He talks smoothly and a lot, but says nothing. And he votes Tea Party consistently. Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do.
Flake is an NPR fan who was a perfectly charming contestant on “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.”
Plus …
Hmmm. Maybe there is no “plus.”
The Mesa town hall was amazing and empowering. Flake is a decent acting person who supports all of the wrong policies and has very little there there once you strip away his veneer of “I just want honest government” - he is just another GOP hack when all is said and done. Charming, yes - representing any of my interests? - overwhelmingly no. He deserves everything he gets, he has sold out everyone except the 1% consistently in his voting, and it is amazing to live in Mesa Arizona and see this kind of action!!
WOW!! To see constituents turning on lazy, in cruise-control pols they’ve elected who never for a minute consider they’re accountable to anyone but reporters and the mic they stick in their face and the red light on the camera is stunning. “By”, “for” and “of” the people is beginning to mean something again.
@birdford The Redford movie from some years ago The Candidate foresaw what a pretty, sort of well intentioned senator looks like. Life is imitating art these days.