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Lindsey Graham: Ode to the Purple Senator
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08/09/09 06:38 PM ET
One of the nine Republicans who voted last Thursday to confirm Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. (The final vote was 68-31, with only Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., unable to make the vote.)
Graham had announced his vote in a Senate floor speech July 22 after, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearings, he had sharply questioned Sotomayor on her "wise Latina" speech and some of her more contentious decisions. It was a politically risky vote.
What made the vote more significant was his explanation of the vote in the speech.
I got to know then-Rep. Graham some 10 or 11 years ago under adverse circumstances. I was on TV virtually every night defending President Bill Clinton from efforts by House Republicans to impeach him; Graham was, by far, the most effective of all the House floor managers in arguing the case for impeachment; and frequently we would find ourselves in green rooms at CNN or MSNBC before we went on air to debate. And it was hard not to get friendly with him and make small talk — he's that nice a guy in person.
On one occasion after a TV show, not too long after the Senate trial in which Clinton was acquitted, he asked me if I wanted to have a beer and compare perspectives on the whole experience. I of course said yes — curious as to how the world looked through his eyes, still thinking of him as a partisan conservative Republican, driven by dislike of Clinton.
I was surprised by what I heard and came to know about Graham. He left me with the impression, without saying so in so many words, that in retrospect he wished there had been an alternative to impeachment. He talked about some of the possible lost opportunities to resolve the matter short of impeachment, especially not long after the November 1998 midterm congressional elections, when the Democrats had surprised everyone (including themselves) and actually gained seats.
But he still strongly believed he had done the right thing by supporting impeachment.
I just as strongly disagreed with him. I still felt deep anger, seeing the impeachment process as being as illegitimate in its naked partisanship as was the attempted impeachment by the "Radical Republicans" of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Nevertheless, I realized partisanship was not the force driving Graham. I could not help but respect his sincerity and authenticity.
Shortly after Rep. Graham became Sen. Graham, in January 2001, our paths crossed in a Senate office building and I congratulated him on his election to the upper chamber. I asked him whether he had gotten to know the freshman Democratic senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton. He said not really, and was a little concerned that she would still be angry with him for the position he had taken regarding the impeachment of her husband.
I told him that the Mrs. Clinton I had known since law school was one of the nicest, warmest, most decent people I had ever met and — most of all — one of the most pragmatic and focused people on doing public good through public service. In other words, I urged him to get to know her and try to work with her and predicted he would end up liking her a lot and they would work well together.
Thus, months later, watching a cable news show one night, I was not surprised to see Sens. Clinton and Graham standing together at a press conference, announcing the passage of a veterans healthcare bill they had co-sponsored as members of the Armed Services Committee.
Sen. Graham's willingness to work with and accomplish something good with Sen. Clinton and many other instances of his rising above partisan politics was consistent with the sentiments he expressed in his July 22 Senate floor speech on his vote on the Sotomayor confirmation.
The speech started with his declaring that one important factor in his decision was that "elections matter" — and that, the people having spoken in November 2008, a president should be given some deference and should be entitled to nominate a Supreme Court justice who reflects his political philosophy.
"Having been one of the chief supporters of Sen. McCain and one of the chief opponents of then-Sen. Obama," he said, "I feel [Obama] deserves some deference on my part when it comes to his first election to the Supreme Court." Then Graham did something unusual in the usual world of partisan Washington, where what’s good for the goose is often not good for the gander. Graham referred to the "well-qualified" rating that Judge Sotomayor had received from the American Bar Association (ABA).
"During the Alito and Roberts confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court under President Bush, I used [the ABA] rating as a positive for both those nominees. I feel, as a Republican, I can’t use it one time and ignore it the other," he said.
Shocking, truly shocking.
Graham is willing to be intellectually honest and consistent, rejecting the political double standard that has become all too frequent in both parties in Washington for at least the last few decades.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, Graham showed the ability to break the vicious "gotcha" political cycle — the political version of the Golden Rule, "Do to them what they did to us." Graham pointed out that in the last round of that cycle, under President George W. Bush, many Democrats, including Obama, voted against Judges Roberts and Alito on largely ideological grounds, as they stated in their own floor statements, despite the two men's obvious outstanding intellectual and professional qualifications. But Graham in his Senate speech stated that he was going to apply the true Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
And so he declared:
"I am starting over. I don’t want to turn over the confirmation of judges to special interest groups on the left or the right, and that is where we are headed if we don’t watch it. We can’t make every Supreme Court vacancy a battle over our culture."
Just to be sure this column doesn’t result in hurting Graham back home among his conservative Republican supporters, let me remind everyone that I disagree with the senator on almost every major issue. He is far too conservative for me; I am a proud liberal Democrat.
But for some time I have considered Graham a truly rare politician: someone who can maintain his conservative principles but still reach across the aisle to find common ground, even, at times, with liberals like me.
He is, in short, the exemplary purple senator.
I salute him — and wish we had more Lindsey Grahams serving in the U.S. Congress.
This piece is also published in The Washington Times.
Graham had announced his vote in a Senate floor speech July 22 after, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearings, he had sharply questioned Sotomayor on her "wise Latina" speech and some of her more contentious decisions. It was a politically risky vote.
What made the vote more significant was his explanation of the vote in the speech.
I got to know then-Rep. Graham some 10 or 11 years ago under adverse circumstances. I was on TV virtually every night defending President Bill Clinton from efforts by House Republicans to impeach him; Graham was, by far, the most effective of all the House floor managers in arguing the case for impeachment; and frequently we would find ourselves in green rooms at CNN or MSNBC before we went on air to debate. And it was hard not to get friendly with him and make small talk — he's that nice a guy in person.
On one occasion after a TV show, not too long after the Senate trial in which Clinton was acquitted, he asked me if I wanted to have a beer and compare perspectives on the whole experience. I of course said yes — curious as to how the world looked through his eyes, still thinking of him as a partisan conservative Republican, driven by dislike of Clinton.
I was surprised by what I heard and came to know about Graham. He left me with the impression, without saying so in so many words, that in retrospect he wished there had been an alternative to impeachment. He talked about some of the possible lost opportunities to resolve the matter short of impeachment, especially not long after the November 1998 midterm congressional elections, when the Democrats had surprised everyone (including themselves) and actually gained seats.
But he still strongly believed he had done the right thing by supporting impeachment.
I just as strongly disagreed with him. I still felt deep anger, seeing the impeachment process as being as illegitimate in its naked partisanship as was the attempted impeachment by the "Radical Republicans" of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Nevertheless, I realized partisanship was not the force driving Graham. I could not help but respect his sincerity and authenticity.
Shortly after Rep. Graham became Sen. Graham, in January 2001, our paths crossed in a Senate office building and I congratulated him on his election to the upper chamber. I asked him whether he had gotten to know the freshman Democratic senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton. He said not really, and was a little concerned that she would still be angry with him for the position he had taken regarding the impeachment of her husband.
I told him that the Mrs. Clinton I had known since law school was one of the nicest, warmest, most decent people I had ever met and — most of all — one of the most pragmatic and focused people on doing public good through public service. In other words, I urged him to get to know her and try to work with her and predicted he would end up liking her a lot and they would work well together.
Thus, months later, watching a cable news show one night, I was not surprised to see Sens. Clinton and Graham standing together at a press conference, announcing the passage of a veterans healthcare bill they had co-sponsored as members of the Armed Services Committee.
Sen. Graham's willingness to work with and accomplish something good with Sen. Clinton and many other instances of his rising above partisan politics was consistent with the sentiments he expressed in his July 22 Senate floor speech on his vote on the Sotomayor confirmation.
The speech started with his declaring that one important factor in his decision was that "elections matter" — and that, the people having spoken in November 2008, a president should be given some deference and should be entitled to nominate a Supreme Court justice who reflects his political philosophy.
"Having been one of the chief supporters of Sen. McCain and one of the chief opponents of then-Sen. Obama," he said, "I feel [Obama] deserves some deference on my part when it comes to his first election to the Supreme Court." Then Graham did something unusual in the usual world of partisan Washington, where what’s good for the goose is often not good for the gander. Graham referred to the "well-qualified" rating that Judge Sotomayor had received from the American Bar Association (ABA).
"During the Alito and Roberts confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court under President Bush, I used [the ABA] rating as a positive for both those nominees. I feel, as a Republican, I can’t use it one time and ignore it the other," he said.
Shocking, truly shocking.
Graham is willing to be intellectually honest and consistent, rejecting the political double standard that has become all too frequent in both parties in Washington for at least the last few decades.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, Graham showed the ability to break the vicious "gotcha" political cycle — the political version of the Golden Rule, "Do to them what they did to us." Graham pointed out that in the last round of that cycle, under President George W. Bush, many Democrats, including Obama, voted against Judges Roberts and Alito on largely ideological grounds, as they stated in their own floor statements, despite the two men's obvious outstanding intellectual and professional qualifications. But Graham in his Senate speech stated that he was going to apply the true Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
And so he declared:
"I am starting over. I don’t want to turn over the confirmation of judges to special interest groups on the left or the right, and that is where we are headed if we don’t watch it. We can’t make every Supreme Court vacancy a battle over our culture."
Just to be sure this column doesn’t result in hurting Graham back home among his conservative Republican supporters, let me remind everyone that I disagree with the senator on almost every major issue. He is far too conservative for me; I am a proud liberal Democrat.
But for some time I have considered Graham a truly rare politician: someone who can maintain his conservative principles but still reach across the aisle to find common ground, even, at times, with liberals like me.
He is, in short, the exemplary purple senator.
I salute him — and wish we had more Lindsey Grahams serving in the U.S. Congress.
This piece is also published in The Washington Times.
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