Jeff Flake

I mean, you don't get all the way to the most exclusive club in the world and just want to stay one term.

So I would have liked to, but the price for doing so would have been for me to say, you know, those principles I said I believed in, I no longer do.

And the cost, the price for that was too steep to bear.

I'll say that's not in vogue now, but I don't think it's gone.

I think it can return.

Oh, definitely.

Yes, completely.

I mean, the real turn in the House came 2005, 2006.

I got there in 2001 when we didn't adopt formally, but basically lived by the so-called Hastert rule.

And it wasn't

Hastert, it was really Tom DeLay and a few others who basically said, if you're going to bring something to the floor as a Republican, and we had a bigger cushion at that time in the majority, but that you should be able to pass it just with Republican votes.

And if it might gather bipartisan support, then knock some provisions off so it won't be attractive.

And then you use that as a cudgel during the next election.

And that, you had people...

kind of mature as politicians, I guess, under that system.

And some of them have gone to the Senate.

I don't think it's an enduring condition.

I think it has to do with leadership.

I look at the potential field on the Democratic and Republican side, and you see some who will try to replicate what President Trump has done in terms of amassing power and kind of stiffing the House and the Senate.

But the vast majority of Republican senators, who I'm most familiar with—