Laurie Roberts:

Flake votes with his tribe, after all.

And the award for best actor in high political drama goes to ...

Jeff Flake.

I must admit, Arizona’s lame-duck senator had me going. In fact, he has had much of America eating out of the palm of his hand.

For a year now, we have hung on his every word as he appealed to the nation’s leaders to throw down their political shackles and put country before party.

Flake wrote an entire book last year pleading with his fellow Republicans not to follow President Donald Trump down the rabbit hole. He has railed against the rancid tone of political discourse and the tribalism that has left us “indulging or even exalting our worst impulses.”

“And what do we, as United States senators, have to say about it?” he asked in his October 2017 floor speech announcing that he would not seek reelection. “The principles that underlie our politics, the values of our founding, are too vital to our identity and survival to allow them to be compromised by the requirements of politics, because politics can make us silent when we should speak, and silence can equal complicity.”

And so, Flake has spoken. And spoken and spoken and spoken.

Last week, he spoke about the country being ripped apart over the Brett Kavanaugh nomination and the need to preserve confidence in our democratic institutions.

“Two institutions, really,” he told

McKay Coppins. “One, the Supreme Court is the lone institution where most Americans still have some faith. And then the U.S. Senate as an institution — we’re coming apart at the seams. There’s no currency, no market for reaching across the aisle. It just makes it so difficult.”

On Monday, he spoke about his desire to put the needs of the country before the needs of the party.

“I have been failing my tribe for some time now,” he said, during an appearance in New Hampshire. “Well, by the ways that we measure political success in this sordid era and by the conventions of how party loyalists are supposed to behave. I hope to continue to fail my tribe. I would encourage us all across the political spectrum to take the same risk. Step out of your tribe.”

So now, it comes time to back up that those pretty speeches with action on what will surely be his most important vote in the Senate, and what does he do?

On Friday, Flake announced that “unless something big changes,” he’ll be falling in line this weekend to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

I can certainly understand why Flake would vote to give Kavanaugh a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court,

given his record as a federal judge.

I can understand why he would ignore the hysterics of Democrats who have railed against Kavanaugh, treating him like the Antichrist from the moment he was nominated. Their strategy of “delay, delay, delay” is obvious.

I can even understand why Flake would side with Kavanaugh in the face of unproven claims that he sexually attacked Christine Blasey Ford when the two were in high school.

What I cannot understand is how a senator who worries about America’s confidence in its democratic institutions can vote to put the man who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week on the Supreme Court.

The one who launched into an angry tirade about Democrats and left-wing conspiracies and revenge of the Clintons.

This is the guy who will call the shots on a 5-4 court that will take on America’s toughest issues over the coming generation?

The newest justice on what a deeply divided America must view as an independent, impartial institution?

Here is Flake on Tuesday, when he expressed concern about Kavanaugh’s “sharp and partisan” interaction with senators.

“We just can’t have that on the court,” Flake said. “We simply can’t.”

Says the man who plans to vote to have that on the court.