South Carolina’s Senator Lindsay Graham has died

www.americanthinker.com

Senator Lindsay Graham’s office announced that the Senator passed away last night after a brief illness. He was 71. During his long political career, Graham spent many years living in John McCain’s shadow. However, after McCain passed away and thanks to the Kavanaugh hearings, Graham found his mojo, becoming a stalwart defender of Donald Trump’s policies and a very good friend to Israel.

The bare-bones facts of Graham’s life are a matter of public record. He was born on July 9, 1955 (so he died just two days after his 71st birthday), into a poor family in the small town of Central, South Carolina. When Graham was still in college, both his parents passed away, so he assumed legal guardianship of his 13-year-old sister, a heavy responsibility for such a young man.

Graham completed college, got his law degree, and served in the Air Force as a Judge Advocate General. He remained in the Air Force reserves for decades, including volunteering to deploy to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He retired in 2015 with the rank of colonel.

After leaving active duty, Graham then worked as a lawyer both in private practice and as a government employee in Central. He began his political career in 1992 as a member of South Carolina’s House of Representatives. By 1995, he’d moved onto the U.S. House of Representatives before entering the Senate in 2003. He was a sitting member of the Senate when he died.

Graham never married. Foes intimated that he was homosexual, although Graham claimed to have had girlfriends in law school and later while serving in Germany. Ultimately, he said he never met the right person. There is no record of any romantic liaisons while he was in office, and his personal life was without scandal.

Graham died last night when EMT’s were called to his home because he was suffering from chest pain, so it sounds as if his heart took him in the end.

Politically, Graham was interesting. While in the Senate, he was a John McCain acolyte, politically following where John McCain led. He really was what now passes for a centrist conservative, a breed that has no place in America’s polarized politics. (Wikipedia accurately lists his political positions over the years, but does so with remarkable and highly non-objective venom.) A true establishment type, he was hostile to the Tea Party and (thanks to McCain) to President Trump.

However, two things happened in 2018. First, McCain died. And second, Graham sat through the ludicrous Kavanaugh nomination hearings. That was when Christine Blowsy-Fraud offered her hazy, uncorroborated memories of Brett Kavanaugh having sexually assaulted her—a claim utterly destroyed by strong contemporaneous evidence.

Somehow, perhaps because he’d been a trial lawyer, Graham suddenly understood that the Democrats were no longer moderates nor could they be dealt with in good faith. Lindsay Graham 2.0 was born:

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Graham 2.0 was feisty, even if he wasn’t always right. I had cause to criticize him over the years for what I thought was a horrible federal abortion ban he wanted to pass and for his willingness to pass the bloated infrastructure bill that Biden got passed in 2021.

As the infrastructure bill showed, he still periodically lapsed into the belief that Democrats in the Senate were rational actors with whom one could have a collegial relationship. However, by 2022, Graham was a “no” vote on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination.

During Trump’s second term, Graham was one of Trump’s most stalwart allies. Trump could count on Graham and will surely miss him.

And for those of us who support Israel, Graham was unwavering in his belief that America had both a practical and moral obligation to support the one small liberal, democratic republic in that sea of malevolent tyrannies. He saw Israel both as a country that had a moral right to exist and one that shared exactly the same enemies as the United States. When I saw him speak about this in person, I was impressed by his charm, which did not come through on news reports or other news shows.

At the end of the day, Graham was one of the good guys, although it took him a long time to realize that about himself. I’m sorry he’s gone.

As for what comes next, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster will appoint someone to take his seat in the U.S. Senate until the next election...which happens to be the upcoming November 2026 election. Those who want to run in November have until July 21 to file for a place on the ballot in a special Republican primary.

The choices for the McMaster appointment and the special primary are probably the same people:

Pamela Evette, the sitting lieutenant governor, who narrowly missed the Republican gubernatorial nomination. (Alan Wilson, the current state Attorney General, won.) I’ve often seen Evette speak and like her a lot. The real question is whether she wants to leave South Carolina and head for the swamp.

Mark Lynch, who placed second in the recent Republican senatorial primary that Graham won (getting 29% to Graham’s 57% of the votes). However, voters may not be thrilled by Lynch’s long-ago arrest and conviction for cocaine-related felony charges. On the other hand, in this religious state, they may be very impressed by his true tale of repentance, reform, and redemption, for he left his troubled youth behind and became a successful, law-abiding citizen.

Nancy Mace, who lost in her bid for governor, but may be more than willing to go back to D.C. if she can sit in the Senate. I’m very ambivalent about her. She’s a fighter, but I hate how coarse she is, and I’m deeply suspicious of how she switches positions (as with the transgender issue) or suddenly becomes ardent about causes (sexual abuse) without any explanation. It seems poll-driven, not principled. I saw her speak live here, and while the hostages were riveting, Mace did not impress me.

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