Some poor fool uploaded a recording to YouTube of Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) upbraiding Democrats for actually trying to conduct a thorough hearing on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to SCOTUS:
A righteous scolding, no? Steve Benen points out some inconvenient facts:
But the GOP senator may not remember recent history as well as he should. “If you want to pick judges from your way of thinking, then you better win an election”? Well, Barack Obama won an election – in fact, he won two – and when he tried to fill a Supreme Court vacancy with a compromise nominee recommended by Republicans, Graham and his GOP colleagues refused to even give Merrick Garland a hearing, choosing instead to impose a months-long blockade with no precedent in the American tradition.
If “winning an election” is the prerequisite to picking judges, why did Graham participate in a partisan scheme to steal a Supreme Court seat from a democratically elected president?
What’s more, Graham is conveniently overlooking the fact that several Senate Republicans argued in 2016 that if Hillary Clinton won the presidential race, they’d block any Supreme Court nominee she chose, regardless of merit, for her entire term. There was, at the time, a pending vacancy on the high court, and at least three GOP senators said that they’d keep that vacancy open until 2021, at the earliest, if the Democratic won.
And there’s more.
But I’m not here to bury Senator Graham. I’m here to glorify his name.
In fact, I’d like to suggest that every time, in the future, that a politician, be they Republican, Democrat, or other, tries to ignore the facts of history while scolding his or her colleagues like children, that politician be known as “pulling a Graham.”
Thank you.
