Love him or hate him, Sen. Lindsey Graham seems to be getting a lot of national attention. At first, it was because he was a Republican that seemed to want to work with President Barack Obama on immigration reform instead of taking executive action. Yet, in later days, he’s been seen as one of Trump’s most ardent supporter– including supporting him on the State of Emergency declaration. Just who is he? Let’s take a deep-dive. According to CNN, here are some of the historical facts about his being on the national political stage:
• 1995-2003- Republican in the US House of Representative
• In 2002, he was elected to the US Senate succeeding Strom Thurmond
• In 2013– he collaborated on a bipartisan immigration reform bill that passed in the senate but not in the house.
• June 1st, 2015 he announced he was running for President, June 7th he said he would welcome Caitlyn Jenner as a political ally.
• In December 2015 he suspends his Presidential campaign.
• In May 2016, he announces he will not be voting for either Trump or Hillary Clinton for President.
• January 2019 the Senate Judiciary Committee states that he has been elected to serve as chairman
It should be noted that Lindsey Graham had a hand with the impeachment proceedings of President William Clinton. He once had this to say about impeachment:
“if this body [Congress] determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role . . . because impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”
Every reporter must now ask @LindseyGrahamSC if he still believes in the standard he set for removing a president in the impeachment of Bill Clinton pic.twitter.com/kbF7guFjm7
— Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) August 22, 2018
It should be noted that weeks after these statements that Congress voted a few weeks later on impeaching President William Clinton and ultimately fell short.
Lindsey Graham was often described by liberal media elites as one of the few moderate Republicans of this era. Now he has recently has gone over to what they see as the dark-side of the force to the Trumpian side. Is it really the case?
In 2016, he clearly expressed that he can’t in good conscience vote for Trump and that:
“I do not believe he is a reliable Republican conservative nor has he displayed the judgment and temperament to serve as commander in chief,” he said in a statement.
“It’s hard to believe that in a nation of more than 300 million Americans, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will be our choices for president,” he said.
In an earlier declaration in 2015– he called the Commander in Chief a jackass defending John McCain for being an American hero against Trump’s comments that were critical of him. He said that Trump crossed a line in saying that John McCain was not an American hero.
It would seem lately that he’s been backing Trump’s positions. In an interview with @FacetheNation— he says a secure border is ‘better for the middle school kids’ than a new school.
The President of the Kentucky Education Association responded to Graham’s comments to the WP saying essentially that any funds that are taken away from schools would be a disservice to those kids.
Mitch McConnell’s spokesperson is quoted as saying that the situation that was described in the Face the Nation interview was a hypothetical.
He also said to Face the Nation that he wanted to know whether McCabe’s admission that the FBI was looking into the 25th amendment were the same essentially as an attempted bureaucratic coup. He told NPR, “I’m going to tell the country about McCabe and the people at the Department of Justice and how they behaved,” Graham said. “Did they take the law in their own hands? Did they abuse the FISA warrant process because they had a political agenda?
Did their hatred of Trump go so far that they abandoned their role of being law enforcement agents and become advocates for a political cause? We’re going to get to the bottom of that.”
He had indicated that he would subpoena both Rosenstein and McCabe if he needed to. McCabe denied actually taking the offer from Rosenstein, said it was a horrible idea and that neither of them did anything about it and Rosenstein denied wearing a wire.
On twitter, @LindseyGrahamSC tweeted ‘I stand firmly behind President Trump’s decision to use executive powers to build the wall-barriers we desperately need’ followed by a Fox News link to the said article.
Clearly, while things may have mattered to Lindsey Graham during the campaign trail it appears that Lindsey Graham has fallen in line and has taken the loyalty plunge with Trump. Watching the 2015 video it seems like his main complaint about Trump was about how he treated war criminals, but also he called Trump a loser for blaming our problems on Mexican immigrants in the 2015 video.
So, what changed for Lindsey Graham? No one may know— but it’s clear that somewhere and somehow along the line, he has became one of Trump’s chief allies and doesn’t seem to mind.
Update: Mitch McConnell is spelled with two ls, not one, and it’s Strom Thurmond, not Storm Thurmond. Also, edited style to the website.
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