Lindsey Graham plays the fool again at Kentanji Brown Jackson hearing
Lindsey Graham is not very comfortable with the truth. That’s my “bless your heart” genteel Southern way of saying the senior senator from the great state of South Carolina is full of it. He’s a comfortable liar. He’s shameless. He’s unprincipled. Untruth pours out of his every pore, except when a blatant self-righteousness seeps out of them first. He’s gotten worse over the years.
And to think me and several others foolishly once believed he was a statesman who would put principle and love of country above party and a thirst for power. How wrong we wrong. So very wrong.
The examples have been piling up for years. The latest example of Graham’s cravenness was on full display during hearings for Supreme Court nominee Kentanji Brown Jackson. When he wasn’t grilling Jackson about her faith, about how real was her Christianity, he was making dubious remarks about race while his colleagues tried to suggest Jackson was a friend of sexual predators. He blamed his childishness on Democratic treatment of conservative nominees such as Brett Kavanaugh. Never mind that a woman came forward with an ugly allegation against Kavanaugh and that it would have been unseemly to have not considered that in his nomination process. Graham and others voted for him even though 4,500 tips to the FBI on Kavanaugh only led to 10 interviews.
Graham, like other Republicans in the Senate, love to play the victim even though they have repeatedly taken a sledgehammer to our democracy. It was Graham who warned the country against backing an incompetent-immoral man like Donald Trump for president – then became one of Trump’s biggest defenders.
It was Graham who gave a supposedly genuine speech on the floor of the Senate after the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection, declaring he was jumping off the Trump train – only to later return back to supporting Trump and the party as he’s long done.
It was the GOP, led by senators like Graham, who refused to even give Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, a hearing, or even meet the man.
It was Graham who said the Senate was setting a new standard with Garland, that they would no longer allow through a nominee that close to an election – only to change when Graham helped rush through a Trump Supreme Court nominee close to the 2020 election.
Graham lies as he breathes. I’m no longer convinced his lungs can function properly without his lying; he’s become such a caricature of what a principled leader is supposed to resemble.
Never mind that Graham voted to appoint Jackson to U.S. Court of Appeals for the District Circuit. He now claims she’s a victory for the “radical left.”
Men like him can’t be shamed; only men with a shred of integrity can be.
He can’t be reasoned with. All he cares about is power and proximity to even more power.
He isn’t fighting for better health care for needy residents of one of the poorest states in the nation. He isn’t fighting for the working-class, black, white or Latino. He doesn’t care that thousands of vulnerable kids were forced back into poverty when extended child tax credit payments were discounted in January.
He doesn’t care about everyday South Carolinians. All he cares about is Lindsey.
He’s in his element during Supreme Court hearings because he can act a fool. That’s all he knows. That’s all he wants to know.
I wish enough residents of the great state of South Carolina would stop enabling him, stop cheering on that mess of a man. He’s repeatedly proven himself to be unworthy of our support.
This story was originally published March 25, 2022 at 10:33 AM with the headline "Lindsey Graham plays the fool again at Kentanji Brown Jackson hearing."