Oh, Lindsey Graham. While the rest of the nation continues to be baffled that the senator still has a job, South Carolina voters duly reelect him. Let’s take a trip to 1999, when Graham, then a 43-year-old member of the House with just six years’ experience in sowing division, took the floor to wax poetic about what impeachment is and when it applies.
Before the tape rolls, it of course goes without saying that the 1999 version of Lindsey Graham sought to take down a Democrat, then-President Bill Clinton; now that Donald Trump is in office, Graham’s hypocrisy has long-since ramped up far beyond threat level midnight. The senator’s spine has been reduced to the consistency of a slightly congealed, cream-based soup ever since he got on the Trump Train.
That being said, when Clinton was his target and he was just a run-of-the-mill, terrible GOPer, Graham, a former Air Force attorney who is now the Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, took a very firm stance on the matter of impeachment in 1999.
Let’s roll that beautiful bean footage.
Transcript time!
REP. LINDSEY GRAHAM: So the point I’m trying to make is (this): You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic, if this body 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.
Graham ‘99 also had strong opinions on what constitutes a crime, according to an appearance on Meet the Press. Roll tape!
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Transcript time!
REP. LINDSEY GRAHAM: He (Clinton) doesn’t have to say, “Go lie for me,” (for it) to be a crime. You don’t have to say, “Let’s obstruct justice” for it to be a crime. You judge people on their conduct, not magic phrases.
If we’re judging Trump on his conduct, then … clearly Graham must want to “cleanse” the Oval Office post-haste. Right?
Unfortunately, when it comes to Donald Trump’s critics-turned-converts, the Palmetto State politician is an unapologetic hypocrite of his own stripe. Even the New York Times Magazine struggled to condense Graham’s unique flippity-floppity, bippity-boppity turnaround on the 2016 loser of the presidential popular vote—check out this amazing, seemingly endless sentence.
And then there is Graham, who would seem to occupy his own distinct category of Trump-era contortionist. Certainly he embodies elements of the other groups: a desire to carve out his own parallel universe of work on certain issues that have always been important to him, especially on foreign policy; an instinct to avoid the distraction of weighing in on every Trump offense (“Don’t chase every barking dog,” he says); and a personal library of readily surfaceable aggressions from the 2016 campaign, in which Graham called the future president a “kook,” “crazy” and “unfit for office,” among other things — and which are easily juxtaposed today with Graham’s sycophantic raves about the president’s stellar golf game and reminders that Trump “beat me like a dog” in the 2016 presidential primary (no doubt delighting Trump with his nod to the president’s canine-themed pejoratives).
Thus it was unsurprising that on Wednesday, in the aftermath of the release of the White House-generated memorandum based on notes by those who listened to the conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Sen. Graham, now 64, offered a very different stance on impeachment.
And an hour and a half later, he taunted the House and boldly stated that the movement to impeach is just fueled by hatred for Trump.
Sigh. He’s so wrong, and it’s clear that he will never, ever place country over party—even when that party has become the party of Trump.
Who’d have ever thought the nation would long for any version of Lindsey Graham, much less one from twenty years ago? People who don’t like cream-based soups, probably.
Click here for more coverage of the whistleblower complaint and the impeachment inquiry.