The Post Editorial Flake’s challenge to others in GOP

For those seeking a return to honor, civility and truthfulness to the White House, Jeff Flake’s speech from the Senate floor this week inspires. More to the point, it was gratifying to hear the Arizona senator rightly and wonderfully challenge those best able to resist the scourge of the Trump presidency: his Republican colleagues.

For months, too many have kept too quiet, a mistake Flake called “a compromise of our moral authority” and a dangerous acceptance of a “new normal” antithetical to the American system, pinning the problem “with the tone set at the top.”

Without naming the president, Flake called for his colleagues to stand up to and against Donald Trump’s “reckless provocations,” made “most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing to do with the fortunes of the people that we have been elected to serve. None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal.”

Flake quoted advice from Theodore Roosevelt:

“The president is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able and disinterested service to the nation as a whole.”

The former Republican president’s quote continues: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by a president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but morally treasonable to the American people.”

Flake argued: “We were not made great as a country by indulg- ing in or even exalting our worst impulses, turning against ourselves, glorifying in the things that divide us, and calling fake things true and true things fake. And we did not become the beacon of freedom in the darkest corners of the world by flouting our institutions and failing to understand just how hard-won and vulnerable they are.”

As refreshing as the comments were, the occasion for them sadly symbolizes the great challenge the Republican placed at his cohorts’ feet.

Flake’s 17-minute speech was in part an acknowledgement he can no longer survive in the current political climate. Fearing a primary opponent backed by Trump and former White House counsel and current Breitbart executive Steve Bannon, Flake said he would be better able to serve unfettered by a likely losing re-election effort.

There’s a trend developing. Former and outgoing elected officials are doing much of the hard work of holding the president accountable. Outgoing Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., aging and ailing Sen. John McCain, and former President George W. Bush have all shown heroism in standing up to Trump.

But for any hope of reining in the out-of-control Trump and ending the poisonous atmosphere that imperils the adults in the room, more Republicans in Congress must rise to the task.

Here in Colorado we’ve seen flashes of resistance from Rep. Mike Coffman and Sen. Cory Gardner, but hardly the kind of sustained leadership needed.

We hope Flake’s words ring in their ears, that “we must be unafraid to stand up and speak out as if our country depends on it, because it does.” The members of The Denver Post’s editorial board are William Dean Singleton, chairman; Mac Tully, CEO and publisher; Chuck Plunkett, editor of the editorial pages; Megan Schrader, editorial writer; and Cohen Peart, opinion editor.