Lindsey Graham’s Hypocrisy Has Made Its Obligatory Appearance at Trump’s Impeachment Trial

From Esquire

Hypocrisy is on its death bed, in part because the people that hypocritical politicians depend on to support them do not get their information from sources that would point out their hypocrisy. Ours is a beautiful time where the fragmentation of media and rabbit-hole social-media algorithms have combined to make it incredibly unlikely any Lindsey Graham fans—such as they are—will see this story about how Lindsey Graham is a hypocrite. If they do come across it, will they read past the headline? And if they do that, will they just dismiss what follows as Fake News?

It's all very predictable, and yet we must point out that on the subject of impeachment, Graham is a world-class flip-flopper. In 1998, when Republicans led by Newt Gingrich were determined to impeach Bill Clinton for something—Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster—they finally settled on his extramarital affairs and the fact Clinton lied under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. At the time, Graham—one of the House impeachment managers—was adamant that impeachable offenses are not limited to violations of the criminal code, but also include "when you start using your office and start acting in a way that hurts people."

Hmm, that certainly sounds like "abuse of power," one of the articles leveled against the current president and which his lawyers are currently arguing does not constitute an impeachable offense. Graham was right to characterize Clinton's behavior as "an important person hurt[ing] someone of low means." He was the President of the United States, and Lewinsky was an intern. It was a completely unacceptable power dynamic, and she was always going to suffer as a result.

Yet the power dynamic between the current president and the rookie president of Ukraine, a country desperate for U.S. assistance to beat back Russian aggression from the East, does not seem to trouble Graham much. Trump exploited that dynamic for his personal gain. Neither do the Ukrainian soldiers Trump sold out by withholding military aid, an act the Government Accountability Office called a crime. Whoops! There was a crime involved in this scheme. But Trump should go not because he violated the criminal code, but because he abused the powers of his office for personal gain and extorted a foreign country to attack American democracy. If abuse of power is not a reason to remove someone from the office that gives them that power, what is?

Again, pointing out Graham's rank hypocrisy on this will probably make no difference. It's never made a difference when someone points out he called Trump "crazy," a "kook" who's "unfit for office," until Trump won the office and had the power and Graham wanted some. Then he attacked the media for characterizing Trump as "some kind of kook." His staunch hawkery on Russia also has been exposed as a cheap scam he ran so he could jump in John McCain's sidecar. It's enough to make you think Ol' Lindsey doesn't believe in very much at all, except that he deserves to feel the rush of power running through his veins.

Since it was Nadler pointing this out, however, it's worth looking at how Nadler's view on impeachment has changed since 1998, when he opposed Clinton's removal. Republicans really had a field day with this one.

Kevin McCarthy has never been the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but surely even he noted towards the beginning when Nadler said, "We must not overturn an election and remove a president from office except to defend our very system of government or our constitutional liberties against a dire threat." The claim that impeachment is overturning an election is silly—the vice president would assume office, and he was elected in the same election—but take his point: this is serious, and we should only use it to defend the Constitution.

Clinton was not endangering the institutions of democracy by lying about his affair, but Nadler and the Democrats are, with good reason, suggesting that Trump's assault on the separation of powers—and indeed, his refusal to recognize the legitimacy of Congress as an institution—is a threat to the republic. In the clip, Nadler then went on to talk about how impeachment should be bipartisan, a reaction to the scorched-earth partisan fuckery of Newt Gingrich that failed to foresee that he was just the beginning. Donald Trump could—as he once bragged—shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and the vote would not be bipartisan. Lindsey Graham is fine evidence of that.

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