The Arizona senator, who has marketed himself as a key Republican critic of President Donald Trump and is scheduled to appear in New Hampshire this October ahead of his planned retirement, revealed on Friday morning how he’ll vote on the Supreme Court nominee. “I wish that I could express the confidence that some of my colleagues have conveyed about what either did or did not happen in the early 1980s, but I left the hearing yesterday with as much doubt as certainty,” Flake, who was considered one of just a few wavering Republicans, said in a statement.
Shortly afterward, several sexual assault survivors confronted Flake in a Senate elevator:
A sexual assault survivor just confronted Jeff Flake (who just announced he's voting for Kavanaugh): "Don't look away from me! Look at me and tell me that it doesn't matter what happened to me, that you will let people like that go into the highest court of the land" pic.twitter.com/Jix2BI090B
— David Mack (@davidmackau) September 28, 2018
But Flake’s decision is relatively consistent with his record. FiveThirtyEight’s congressional tracker reports that Flake votes along with the president’s agenda 83.6 percent of the time. His vote for Kavanaugh at this afternoon’s Senate Judiciary Committee meeting, after which the nominee will advance to the full Senate next week, will just be one more sign that he supports Trump’s agenda more often than he doesn’t.