Lindsey Graham, South Carolina’s senior senator, was elected to the House in 1994 and to the Senate in 2002. He has assumed the mantle once occupied by his close friend, Arizona Republican John McCain, as the media-friendly maverick willing to confound conservatives by collaborating with Democrats on high-profile initiatives.
Graham grew up in Pickens County, where his parents owned a tavern in the textile mill town of Central, S.C. Both his parents died young, while Graham was still attending the University of South Carolina, and he became his younger sister’s legal guardian. He was the first in his family to graduate from college, and then received a law degree from the University of South Carolina. He was an Air Force prosecutor who worked on assignments overseas, including one case that led to major changes in the service’s drug testing program for soldiers. In 1988, he returned home and practiced law in Seneca. In 1992, he was elected to the state House. Graham was called up to active duty and served stateside during the Gulf War, and he has been in the Air Force Reserves since 1995, as a senior instructor in the Air Force’s JAG school and also as a reserve judge on the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals.
In 1994, with the retirement of 20-year Democratic U.S. Rep. Butler Derrick, Graham ran for the House. Both parties had contested primaries, and Graham won the Republican primary without a runoff with 52% of the vote. In the general election, he faced state Sen. Jim Bryan. Graham called for term limits, supported more defense spending and opposed gays in the military. His attitude toward the Clinton administration and the Democratic leadership was unequivocal. He said, “I’m one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up.” Graham won 60%-40%, a smashing victory in a district represented only by Democrats since Reconstruction. In the House, Graham had a solidly conservative voting record but did not always support the Republican leadership. In the summer of 1997, he was among a small group of junior House members who plotted with some senior lawmakers to try to oust Speaker Newt Gingrich, who by then had lost the confidence of his Republican troops. But the attempt failed. In a Republican Conference meeting, when Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, one of the plotters, asserted that no member of the leadership was involved, Graham challenged that assertion as false.
As a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Graham played a major role in the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton. In the Senate trial, Graham’s folksy manner and clear description of Clinton’s offenses—“Where I come from, a man who calls someone up at 2:30 in the morning is up to no good”—made him one of the most effective GOP impeachment managers. In 2000, Graham was one of McCain’s staunchest supporters in his first bid for the presidency.
Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond, re-elected to his eighth term in 1996, one month before he turned 94, had promised not to run again in 2002. There had not been an open South Carolina Senate seat since 1941. (Both Thurmond and longtime Democratic Sen. Ernest Hollings won their seats by beating incumbent senators appointed to fill vacancies.) Yet in this now heavily Republican state, Graham had no opposition in the Republican primary. His work on impeachment and in the McCain campaign had made him well-known and popular statewide, and he was endorsed by three former governors and Thurmond. Democrats portrayed him as lacking in substance and recruited Alex Sanders, president of the College of Charleston who in 1985 was appointed to the state Court of Appeals.
Sanders was a gifted raconteur, charming and well-connected around the state. He was a solid fundraiser as well, eventually raising $4.2 million, below Graham’s $5.8 million, but a considerable achievement for a candidate consistently behind in the polls. He supported the Bush tax cuts and military action in Iraq. But he opposed the death penalty, on religious grounds, and he opposed a constitutional amendment to allow criminalization of flag burning. Graham hammered him on the death penalty and the flag amendment but most of all tried to label him as a liberal, saying Sanders would advance the agenda of Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Graham won 54%-44% and took the place of a senator first elected in the year before he was born.
He has had a mostly conservative voting record—he was the 24th most conservative senator in 2010, according to National Journal’s rankings. But he has made some noteworthy breaks with his party, occasionally testing the limits of Republicans’ patience. Graham was the only Judiciary Committee Republican to support President Barack Obama’s choice of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court in 2009, saying the president deserved the prerogative to nominate a qualified person of his choice even if the GOP disagreed with her ideology. He took the same position a year later when Obama nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan for the court. In addition to praising her intellect, he said, “She’s funny, and that goes a long way in my book.”
Graham also backed Obama’s decision to close the U.S. military prison at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, though he sharply opposed the president’s plans to try suspected terrorists in civilian courts instead of military ones. He even defended Treasury secretary nominee Timothy Geithner after it was revealed Geithner had failed to pay back taxes. Although he had supported the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout legislation in 2008, Graham’s centrist tendencies ceased when it came to Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill in January 2009. He said the legislation “created more government than jobs,” and criticized Obama’s outreach to Republican colleagues. When Republican Gov. Mark Sanford initially said he would refuse South Carolina’s share of the federal stimulus money unless a portion of it could go to pay down the state’s debt, Graham said he believed Sanford should accept the money. But on some economic matters, Graham was still the maverick bucking his party. In February 2009, he said he supported a limited nationalization of some banks and Obama’s proposal to “stress-test” banks. “I’m not going to be the Herbert Hoover of 2009, saying ‘Just let the free market work it out,’” he told the Charlotte Observer.
What brought Graham the most attention, however, was his personal negotiations with Democrats on two of the hot button issues in the 111th Congress (2009-10): climate change and immigration. His actions came as McCain was preoccupied with a 2010 primary challenge from the right and sought to burnish his conservative credentials. On climate change, Graham sought to frame the issue as essential toward achieving energy independence: “To me, it is about jobs, not polar bears,” he told The New York Times. He made clear his disdain with the House-passed bill in 2009 creating a cap-and-trade program limiting greenhouse gas emissions and embarked with Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry and Connecticut independent Sen. Joe Lieberman on an alternative method of pricing carbon. But Graham angrily pulled out of those discussions in April 2010 when Majority Leader Harry Reid reportedly planned to bring an immigration bill to the Senate floor before taking up the energy and climate change measure. He told his two colleagues that Reid’s move was “nothing more than a cynical political ploy” and that the highly charged subject of immigration would muddy the waters for a compromise on climate change. The Senate never took up a climate bill in 2010, and the Republican takeover of the House in 2010 moved the issue to the back burner.
Graham had earlier been working with Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York on the immigration issue. They came up with a plan that included toughening border security and requiring biometric Social Security cards to ensure illegal immigrants could not get jobs. But the furor over the climate debate ended the Graham-Schumer partnership. Graham later joined conservatives in calling for an end to birthright citizenship, a position that incensed his onetime immigration allies. “He has either taken leave of his senses or of his principles,” pro-immigration former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in The Washington Post. And Graham joined Republicans in opposing the DREAM Act giving the children of illegal immigrants a potential path to citizenship in December 2010.
It was not the first time Graham had waded into the immigration debate. In 2006 and 2007, Graham supported the McCain-Kennedy and Kennedy-Kyl immigration bills, positions that got him in considerable trouble with conservatives who opposed giving illegal immigrants a process to achieve citizenship. Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh belittled him as “Lindsey Grahamnesty” and the Greenville County Republican party voted to censure him. Graham’s public comments suggesting that immigration bill opponents were “bigots” did not help his cause. He tried to rebound in late 2007 by including a $3 billion border security amendment in a defense spending bill. It would fund 700 miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border and provide additional vehicle barriers and ground censors, but it was stripped from the final version of the bill by Senate Democrats. In December 2007, Graham joined with Sen. Evan Bayh to support the Indiana Democrat’s legislation to impose higher penalties on people found smuggling illegal immigrants across the border, but the amendment never made it out of the Judiciary Committee.
Graham disagreed with the Bush administration on important issues. He voted against the Medicare prescription drug bill in 2003 and against the Republican medical malpractice bill in 2003 and 2004, calling it “one of the worst pieces of legislation I have ever seen.” But he co-sponsored a bill requiring that the losing party pays the other side’s legal fees in lawsuits between parties from different states. In 2005, he proposed a federal law shielding reporters from having to disclose their sources in court.
Graham was hard on the Bush administration over its increasingly bold techniques in terrorism investigations. He objected to surveillance of communications between al-Qaida suspects abroad and persons in the United States. He was also a critic of the policy of holding unlawful combatants at Guantanamo Bay without offering them an array of rights. When the Bush administration proposed procedures for trying the detainees, Graham criticized them for not allowing detainees to see all the evidence against them and for defying Geneva Conventions, although he agreed that such unlawful combatants were not entitled to full Geneva Conventions. Working with McCain and Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., Graham marshaled his expertise in military law and procedure to produce a bill allowing aggressive and classified interrogation techniques, defining what is a “grave breach” of the Geneva Conventions and establishing military tribunals allowing defendants to confront the evidence against them. The legislation passed as part of the 2006 defense spending bill.
Since his arrival in the Senate, Graham has been interested in solutions to the Social Security solvency issue. In 2003, he unveiled his own plan: 4% personal retirement accounts, with higher taxes for workers who do not choose them. The proposal was sharply criticized by some conservatives, but Graham persisted. He participated in private meetings with both Democratic and Republican senators, and he insisted that raising the payroll tax limit was necessary if a plan was to get Democratic support.
Comparing his political style to McCain’s, Graham told The New York Times: “I’ve never been a Luke Skywalker; I’m a much more calculating guy than that. I understand that you just don’t charge into these things based on some moral belief that you’re right and the other guy’s wrong.” Without much of a threat to his own re-election bid, Graham in 2008 traveled the country with McCain, the Republican presidential nominee. McCain, Graham and Lieberman formed a sort of bipartisan triumvirate on the campaign trail. Graham’s support was helpful to McCain in the pivotal January 2008 South Carolina primary, in which McCain redeemed his 2000 loss by winning with 33% of the vote. “There’s nobody I trust more than Lindsey Graham,” McCain told the Myrtle Beach Sun News. Graham was said to be the member of McCain’s inner circle who was the most enthusiastic about him tapping Lieberman as his running mate, according to the 2010 book about the campaign, Game Change. But McCain settled on Alaska then-Gov. Sarah Palin after Graham began privately floating the idea of Lieberman with social conservatives, enraging Limbaugh and others when word leaked out.
Graham’s departures from the party orthodoxy—especially his vote to confirm Kagan—have fueled talk of a primary challenger in 2014. A Public Policy Polling survey in February 2011 found that 52% of regular GOP primary voters said they would back a more conservative choice, with Rep. Joe Wilson—known for shouting “You lie!” at Obama during the president’s 2009 health care speech to Congress—leading Graham 43%-41% in a hypothetical matchup. But Graham will be a formidable opponent. In addition to his considerable GOP connections from his association with McCain, he has had a key ally in his South Carolina Senate colleague Jim DeMint, who emerged as a kingmaker for the far right in 2010. And in 2011, Graham sought to mend fences with the tea party, a movement he had once predicted would “die out.” He recruited two freshman senators who were tea party favorites, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah, to work with him on Social Security. And he joined new Republican Gov. Nikki Haley in blasting the Democratic health care overhaul.
