South Carolina Senior Senator Lindsey Graham was once a staunch never-Trump Republican. He even called Trump a “kook” and “crazy” during the 2016 presidential race. Now that Trump is president, though, and Senator Graham is up for re-election himself in 2020, Graham has become a complete sycophant when it comes Donald Trump, regardless of the orange one’s incompetence and wrongdoing while in office.
Graham did an interview with CNN International, and told interviewer Becky Anderson the following:
“This thing will come to the Senate, and it will die quickly, and I will do everything I can to make it die quickly.”
“I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here, what I see coming, happening today is just a partisan nonsense.”
“Personally I think President Trump will come out of this stronger and the good news is that everybody in politics in America needs to prove to the American public we’re not all completely crazy. So there may be a spirit of compromise coming post-impeachment, born of political necessity, if anything else.”
Now, there are a few reasons that Senator Graham’s taking of such a position is dangerously outrageous. For one thing, he is the Chairman of the Senator Judiciary Committee. In both chambers of Congress, both the House and the Senate, it is that committee that leads the proceedings and charges in any impeachment matters. When the Chairman of that committee openly says he will not be fair, it turns the whole process into a farce. Secondly, Congress is a co-equal branch of the United States federal government. Those 535 people in the House of Representatives and the Senate do not work for the president. They are, if anything, supposed to be a check on the Executive Branch. Senator Graham said, quite openly, that he has no intention of doing that. In other words, he is flat out refusing to do his job, and openly instructing his colleagues on that very important committee not to do their jobs either.
At the end of the day, the Republican majority in the Senate is being headed up on a very important committee in these proceedings by a man who has stated that he cares not one bit about his actual job. He cares about political power-even if it means protecting and enabling the very type of Executive our Founding Fathers feared the most.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr
