How Lindsey Graham's mind works

Lindsey Graham's 2016 "use my words against me" challenge is what sticks with most people right now. But the words he said next strike me as more important.

"You can use my words against me, and you'd be absolutely right," Lindsey Graham said in 2016, when he promised with much gravity that he'd abide in the future by the precedent he was setting then. He then continued, wagging his finger for emphasis: "We're setting a precedent here today, Republicans are, that in the last year, at least of a lame duck eight-year term, I would say it's gonna be a four-year term, that you're not gonna fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court based on what we're doing here today. That's gonna be the new rule."

But now we see there was no actual rule, but just a cynical expediency.

It is fascinating, and admittedly disturbing, to examine how Lindsey Graham's mind works. He claims the moral high ground by invoking a principle he assumes he will never have to test. In the giddy glow of blocking Obama's nominee, he can be magnanimous and (in theory) consistent. As long as the principle remains untested, Lindsey is golden. He can refer back, whenever it suits him, to his previous egalitarian high mindedness. We can imagine a halo, unearned, appearing above his head.

So Lindsey claims purity while hoping to not have to be pure, although in all likelihood he didn't think it through quite so rigorously. Most likely, Lindsey Graham's mind just got out over its skis. In the untested moment, he can be pure by not having to demonstrate it.

The point here is that Lindsey Graham's mind constructs imagined, self-serving realities from uninstantiated hypotheticals, and uses them for its own purposes as if they are real. As I wrote in 2017, Lindsey Graham defended blocking Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court by insisting Democrats would have done the same. In this, I wrote, Lindsey Graham slandered Senate Democrats by claiming they would have done the exact despicable deed that he in fact did. Thus Lindsey ascribed to Democrats an outrageous act they did not do, and used that ascription to justify his own doing it.

Now Lindsey is at it again. He's proceeding to violate his clearly stated 2016 "precedent"—indeed, "rule"—by once again accusing Democrats of being as deplorable as he is. Lindsey wrote this to Judiciary Committee Democrats: "I am certain if the shoe were on the other foot, you would do the same."

Certain? Certain?  Hell no. It is Lindsey, and Republicans, who did the deed back in 2016. It is Lindsey, and Republicans, who are now shamelessly abandoning their previous expedient "principle" in favor of the raw exercise of unprincipled power. Lindsey has no right to drag Democrats into his pit of dishonor. None at all.

For some years now, Lindsey Graham's mind has been vacated of any enduring principle, and now he is nothing but a pathetic political animal grubbing for power. George Will wrote this in his most recent column: "Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina contortionist, illustrates the perils of attempted cleverness by people with negligible aptitude for it. He says that the principle he enunciated in 2016 and reaffirmed in 2018 — that he would not support confirming a Supreme Court nominee in the last year of President Trump’s term — has expired. One reason he gives is — really — that Democrats in 2013 ended filibusters for circuit-court nominees."

What's most remarkable is that Lindsey Graham has no apparent capacity, not just for cleverness, but indeed for shame and embarrassment. That applies to Republicans generally, who are in the end stage of a terminal sickness which will soon sweep them out of power. It can't happen soon enough.

 

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