Jeff Flake enters the Senate as one of the leading Republican voices on the issue of fiscal responsibility.
“With the exception of Rep. Paul Ryan, perhaps no candidate for federal office in this election cycle is more committed to forcing sanity back into the nation's finances,” wrote the Arizona Republic in endorsing Mr. Flake.
During his six terms in the House, Flake took a hard stand against earmarks, leading reform on the practice and also ruffling the GOP leadership. He also went against the party line by voting against President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and the 2003 legislation that would have expanded benefits for prescription drugs under Medicare. He also joined Democrats supporting an end to the trade embargo with Cuba and prohibiting workplace discrimination against gays, according to the National Journal.
In the Senate, he plans to pursue his “limited government, economic freedom, and individual responsibility” mantra – principles he advocated as executive director of the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank.
Flake also expects to play a role in bipartisan immigration reform this year, he told The Hill, joining fellow Republicans Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida.
In an interview with PBS NewsHour, he said immigration is “a problem that just gets bigger and worse, particularly for a border state like Arizona. And this is one that's going to require working across the aisle, where both parties take the plunge on certain items.… And certainly after this election, Republicans realized that not just for substantive policy reasons, for political reasons as well, it behooves us to move ahead.”
Flake defeated Democrat Richard Carmona, a former US surgeon general, by a narrow margin: 3.9 percentage points. Though Mr. Carmona gained on Flake in the polls, Arizona is a solid Republican state – voters haven’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in 18 years. He replaces retiring Republican Jon Kyl, who served three terms.
Flake is a fifth-generation Arizonan, raised in Snowflake, Ariz., a town named after his great-great-grandfather. Flake, a Mormon, did his missionary work in South Africa and Zimbabwe. He also moved to Namibia in 1989 to run the Foundation for Democracy, which monitored the democratization process in the country.
Flake is slated to serve on four committees: Foreign Relations, Energy and Natural Resources, Judiciary, and Aging.
