Mostly Monday Reads: As the Senate Churns

“Mitch McConnell isn’t messing around in his new leadership role.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

We’ve been playing Where’s Mitch for about a month now, when Republican Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly of an Aortic Dissection. The Republican Senate Majority is already a close call without the current situation, and polls show a good possibility of a switch to Democratic Leadership, given the chaos of this Trump Term. Given the headlines and the accompanying stories, I think we can safely say that whatever respect Graham may have had, he sacrificed it to serve Orange Caligula.

Here’s the story that grabbed me first, today. This is an Op Ed at Public Notice from Tom Schaller. “Lindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatism. From Gingrich to Trump, Graham was a fixture as the GOP became increasingly malignant.” Sounds right to me.

The sudden death this weekend of Lindsey Graham at age 71 — young, by today’s gerontocratic standards — is a personal parable for the changes within the conservative movement and modern Republican Party during Graham’s political career.

Indeed, few national elected officials so perfectly bridge the rapid rise of the Newt Gingrich-led GOP to the steady gutting of American conservatism by Donald Trump over the past decade.

Graham is not the sole member of that bridge generation; the career of fellow Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, for example, spans back further, to the days when Barry Goldwater remained conservatism’s intellectual beacon. But Graham perfectly embodies the post-1990s morphing of conservatism into the malignant force that, today, animates Eric Hoffer’s famous observation that every great cause “begins as a movement, becomes as business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

The analysis is a long, winding road of the shifting malignancy that became Senator Lindsey Graham. A few examples stood out to me.  As we all know and remember, Graham never met a military excursion he didn’t support. Schaller’s conclusion, however, makes all the prior evidence add up completely.

Lindsey Graham died a coward. His three-decade career in national politics should be remembered for more than his shameless, pusillanimous capitulations — but not, unfortunately, for some noble pursuit or purpose he used his chameleon-like political skills to secure. He should instead be remembered for using his power to bow and scrape, to change his political colors, largely if not solely in service to himself.

Conservative figures like the deathly-ill Mitch McConnell or Chief Justice John Roberts have been described as destroyers and “gravediggers” of American democracy. But at least they have wielded their shovels to bury America’s constitutional traditions and safeguards in pursuit of their own pinched and petty political philosophies.

Lindsey Graham, American chameleon, did nothing of the sort. He cowered and capitulated for three decades in Congress merely to be at the center of power. From 1994 revolutionary to 2026 poltroon, he embodies the movement-to-business-to-racket transformation of modern conservatism. He lived for nothing and died the same way.

May he rest in pusillanimity.

That’s pretty much the consensus from all sorts of media contributors. Of course, we do have the major trad media that’s doing its best to make the proverbial sow’s ear into a purse. Take CBS, for example, Puleeze. “Breaking down Lindsey Graham’s key accomplishments. Tributes are pouring in for longtime South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died Saturday at 71 from an aortic dissection, according to the medical examiner’s preliminary findings. CBS News‘ Fin Gomez breaks down some of his key accomplishments.” Do not watch the messiness they put on air with a full stomach. I’m not sure being a leader on ‘stronger, more muscular’ on military and diplomatic fronts is a positive thing.

The Washington Post, another legacy media outlet, has this headline today. “Graham’s journey with Trump embodies how the Republican Party has changed.”  He was definitely a follower of whatever the current craze was, that’s for sure. Dan Merica wrote this analysis.

Lindsey Graham was not always a fan of Donald Trump.

But the late senator, whose death was announced on Sunday, so forcefully came around on the president that Trump was likely one of the last people to speak with the South Carolina Republican on Saturday.

That shift — from outspoken critic to unyielding confidant — exemplifies how Trump has transformed the Republican Party so completely in his own image, turning one-time skeptics into true believers while exiling those who refused to bend to his will.

Consider this: Graham went from calling Trump a “jackass” who would cost the party the presidency in 2016 to saying Trump was “not far behind God” a decade later.

Graham and Trump’s relationship began, in earnest, during the Republicans’ 2016 presidential primary, decades after Graham entered Congress as part of the Republican revolution of 1994. Graham’s campaign was short-lived; he entered the race in June 2015 and ended it six months later without fanfare. Two weeks after Graham’s announcement, however, Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower and, well, never exited.

Graham was one of Trump’s harshest critics during his brief campaign, highlighted by the then-GOP frontrunner giving out the senator’s cell phone number at an event and Graham later calling Trump a “jackass.” Trump routinely mocked Graham’s low standing in the polls and called him “one of the dumbest human beings I have ever seen.” And Graham vented about the way Trump spoke about Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona).

After exiting in December 2015, Graham first endorsed former Florida governor Jeb Bush, then got behind Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed,” Graham wrote on Twitter in May 2016 when Cruz dropped out. “And we will deserve it.”

Graham didn’t even vote for Trump in 2016, deciding instead to stand on the platform of the proverbial Trump train and vote for independent Evan McMullin.

What a difference a decade makes.

I believe that Graham morphed quicker than that. He went from the old McCain corner of voice of reason to the voice of treason pretty quickly. He was the most overt opportunist I think I’ve ever witnessed. The only thing he was consistent on was war mongering. He never heeded the warnings from Lincoln or Eisenhower about the threat of the military-industrial complex.

Politico now reports that Trump wants his seat to go to his sister. “McMaster, Trump look to Graham’s sister for Senate.  South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster is expected to announce the interim replacement later Monday.”

President Donald Trump said Monday he wants South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster to appoint Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to serve the remainder of the late senator’s term.

One Republican familiar with McMaster’s plans said the governor intends to appoint Nordone to serve in the Senate for the rest of the year. This person was granted anonymity to discuss the decision.

McMaster is expected to announce his decision about who will replace Graham during a press conference later Monday afternoon.

“I recommended, to Governor Henry McMaster, Lindsey Graham’s wonderful sister, Darline, to serve as interim Senator from the Great State of South Carolina,” Trump said in a post on social media. “This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!”

Even if she’s appointed, it’s unclear if Nordone would want to run for the full term. A number of South Carolina Republicans have already expressed interest in taking over Graham’s seat since his death Sunday, including Reps. Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.).

Trump’s word carries significant weight in deeply conservative South Carolina, and his preference for a caretaker appointment triggers a wide-open primary to take Graham’s place as the Republican nominee for Senate.

The Republican Party has now made me unable to stomach voting for their women. The story behind the two of them is endearing.  This story is from Yahoo! News. “Inside the family life of Lindsey Graham, the senator who helped raise his little sister. Graham, who died Saturday at 71, became his sister Darline’s legal guardian after their parents died 15 months apart. He never married, and called her the closest person in his life.”  Jack Brewster has the story. It does include a few comments about a gay man and his commitment to undermining his own identity. Again, opportunism seems to rule his decisions.

Lindsey Graham was one of the rare U.S. senators who never married and had no children. But the South Carolina Republican, who died Saturday at 71 after a brief and sudden illness, did not consider himself a man without a family.

“I’ve never married. I guess I attribute that to timing, too,” Graham wrote in his 2015 memoir. “The opportunity never presented itself at the right time, or I never found time to meet the right girl, or the right girl was smart enough not to have time for me. I haven’t been lucky that way. But I have a family.”

That family was, above all, his younger sister, Darline Graham Nordone.

I tend to fall more in line with what Jeer Heet offers in his Graham Obit at The Nation today. “Lindsey Graham Chose Evil. Conspiracy theorists liked to say that Graham’s Trump sycophancy was a result of blackmail. But the truth is worse: He stuck with Trump to keep the US war machine going.”  I think he will be mostly remembered for his war mongering and his complete reservation on Trump.

Although Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly on Saturday at 71, was one of the most odious figures in American public life, he does deserve a partial defense from a strangely pervasive calumny directed against him by liberal critics. In the last decade of his life, Graham underwent a dramatic political transformation. In 2015 and early 2016, Graham became a no-holds-barred foe of Donald Trump, whom he lambasted as “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who “represents the worst in America.” But Graham started to warm to Trump once the insurgent candidate won the Republican primary on May 4, 2016. This process accelerated after Trump was elected president in November, when Graham became, against stiff competition, the president’s most obsequious lackey.

Graham’s metamorphosis was all the more startling because his earlier disdain for Trump sprang logically from his political history. Prior to 2016, Graham was best known as the ultra-hawkish ally of fellow war-happy senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman (their noxious nickname for themselves was the “Three Amigos”), which made him a natural opponent of candidate Trump’s isolationist foreign policy. Further, Graham had a history of bipartisanship, working with Democrats on immigration reform and campaign finance and casting the sole Republican vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nominations. This gave Graham a profile, on domestic matters at least, more mainstream than Trump’s burn-it-down populism.

What explains Graham’s quick change of political identity? One theory popular among Resistance liberals and Never Trump conservatives was that the senator, who was widely rumored to be a closeted gay man, had been blackmailed by Trump, perhaps with kompromat provided by Vladimir Putin. In 2019, for instance MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle dropped a heavy-breathing hint along this line by suggesting that Trump knows “something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.”

The blackmail theory was never grounded in evidence and suffered the further disadvantage of making Graham seem like a victim rather than someone making affirmative choices about his life. The actual story of Graham’s ideological conversion is much worse than any conspiracy, because he gave us his principles for the worst of reasons: to stay close to the center of power, stave off MAGA primary challenges, and bring Trump around to Graham’s deeply militarist worldview.

It’s hard for me to spend so much time and energy on Graham, but he was always along for every political ride, one way or another, grabbing onto any diatribe he could. I hope these next few days will at least raise questions about the idea of “to thyself be true.”  He confused me. He denied being a gay man, but sure rode his own interests into some disturbing behaviors and politics. I bet he’d love to see all this attention he’s generated by dying so unexpectedly and young.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?