Sen. enabled by retirement

Swing-vote GOP U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake says he would not have been able to take the bipartisan position he wanted to in the ongoing Supreme Court hearings if he were running for office again.

“There’s no value to reaching across the aisle,” Flake told Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” in a report that aired last night. There’s no currency for that anymore. There’s no incentive.”

The weekly news program aired a segment last night about the deeply divisive hearings for controversial Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who’s accused of sexual assault.

Flake, a retiring Arizona senator who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Friday broke party lines and said he would not cast a final vote to confirm Kavanaugh until the FBI investigated the groping allegations against him.

“Sen. Flake, you’ve announced that you’re not running for reelection, and I wonder, could you have done this if you were running for re-election?” Pelley asked him on the TV program. “Not a chance,” Flake said. Flake originally had announced his support for Kavanaugh on Friday morning, but then called for a week’s delay to make time for an investigation after two women who said they had been sexually assaulted confronted Flake in an elevator and demanded he vote against Kavanaugh.

“I just knew that we couldn’t move forward, that I couldn’t move forward without hitting the pause button,” Flake told “60 Minutes.” “Because what I was seeing, experiencing, in an elevator and watching it in committee and just thinking, this is tearing the country apart.”