Don't Speak Ill of the Dead

We tend to give persons a pass when they are terminally ill or dead out of respect, but do these two men deserve any respect?

Mitch went out of his way to stack the Supreme Court, first by refusing to consider Pres. Obama’s nomination for Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat in 2016, despite his death coming in February with 11 months remaining in Obama’s second term. Then by stuffing the court with Amy Coney Barrett when Ruth Bader Ginsburg suddenly passed away in September of 2020. You can say this was just shrewd politics, but Mitch tried to justify his earlier position on Scalia by citing the “Biden rule,” and then turned right around and broke it when he saw a golden opportunity to have a 6–3 advantage on the Supreme Court. We all know what happened next.

Lindsey is an equally smarmy character always sucking up to whoever is in power. For years, he was given a pass because of his close relationship to John McCain, whom many considered a man of great moral character. Lindsey hoped to have some of that moral character rub off on him but when he chose to latch onto Trump to save his Senate seat in South Carolina, you knew this guy would stoop to anything to stay in Congress. Not like he did anything noteworthy, but he was always buzzing around, acting like he was a major voice, when the vast majority of senators, Republican and Democrat, couldn’t stand him, and for good reason. This was a guy who would abandon you at the drop of a hat, a red hat in this case. Yet, his sudden passing seems to have brought out nothing but praise for this chameleon.

Sorry, I’m not buying it. He’s for something or against something only as long as it suits his personal interests. Some would like to claim he was the Ukraine whisperer in Donald’s ear. He even visited Kyiv shortly before his untimely death. If so, it doesn’t seem like Trump listened to him. For the past year-and-a-half, Trump has made it as hard as possible for Ukraine to gain the upper hand, blocking shipments of much needed Patriot and Tomahawk missiles, holding up aid packages and persistently saying that Ukraine should surrender to Russia in the face of overwhelming odds. Now that the tide is turning in the long-running war, Donald seems more inclined to consider Ukraine’s position but I don’t think it is because of Lindsey. Trump just doesn’t want to be associated with a loser, which is what Russia appears today.

Let’s remember that this is the same Donald Trump who gave out Lindsey’s phone number during the 2016 presidential campaign and demeaned him every opportunity he got.

“This guy Lindsey Graham, he’s one of the dumbest human beings I have ever seen, ” Trump said at a rally in Bluffton. “He starts hitting me, saying vicious things, ends up with 0%. He left in disgrace.”

Now here he is offering a eulogy to his dear friend, a rather guarded one in which he concluded, “other than being tired, he was fine, a quick end, and maybe that’s not the worst way to go.” Donald had talked to Lindsey on the phone after his return from Ukraine.

Mitch, however, just keeps hanging on. He had surprisingly become Trump’s nemesis upon his return to the White House in 2025, voting against key legislation, including the SAVE Act, which Trump believes is the only way Republicans can avoid a slaughter at the polls this Fall. With Mitch bedridden, Donald thought he had the votes to carry the legislation across the line in the Senate but he lost a key vote in Graham. This sort of made Democrats forget about all the things Mitch did to stack the Supreme Court and federal courts with Federalist appointees. Mitch is no friend of the Democrats. This is an issue of states rights for him and he doesn’t believe the federal government should intercede on voting regulations.

Besides, Mitch felt the Republicans had the Senate locked up no matter how the midterms went, especially with Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Fetterman siding with Republicans on most issues important to them. The Dems need to flip five seats to gain the upper hand and the electoral math simply doesn’t favor them. The SAVE Act was a waste of time as far he was concerned.

While Mitch relished Machiavellian politics, Lindsey was supposedly more pragmatic. He sought concessions to get bipartisan bills through a deeply divided Senate. He loved to put himself at the vanguard of these efforts as if he was “saving” these bills. In the end, he would always fall back on the party line, especially if he was in danger of losing his seat.

This was the case with the health care bill he and a handful of Republicans tried to push through Congress in 2017 as an alternative to “Obamacare” that Republicans were determined to repeal now that Trump was president. In this way he hoped to swing back three Republicans who were against repealing the Affordable Care Act, among them John McCain. It was a typical empty bill Lindsey was proposing, yet it blew up in his face. The folks back home in Trumpistan, also known as South Carolina, thought he was pitching another version of “Obamacare” and threatened to tar and feather him, or at least “primary” him in the next election. Just like that he dropped the bill.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This can be said of both Mitch and Lindsey. Mitch had long ruled the Republican roost in the Senate, turning over the reins to John Thune in 2024, when his health had become an issue. No one knew the system and how to subvert it better than Mitch did. Lindsey was always a small but vocal player, who tried desperately to move out from behind the shadow of John McCain, who had mentored him for years. Sadly, it didn’t seem like he learned much. Say what you will about McCain, he stuck to his convictions. Lindsey didn’t seem to have any convictions.

So here we are with one gone and the other on life support, bringing the Republican senate majority down to 51. If you count Fetterman, 52. That means they have only a three-vote margin of error without having to enlist the aid of VP Vance to break a tie. That’s a mighty thin margin, especially in an effort to save the SAVE Act. Trump made enemies of John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) by endorsing their Republican opponents in recent primaries. However, Trump won’t sign any legislation, not even a bipartisan housing bill that passed both chambers, until Congress passes his SAVE Act. He thinks this is the only way to spare the United States from a “Communist” revolution in November, a fate worse than the World Wars and 9/11 put together.

The only reason Lindsey was for this voter ID bill is because he thought it would save his ass in South Carolina. Polls had him barely ahead of his Democratic challenger, Annie Andrews, with many MAGA faithful showing no interest in his candidacy. They would stay home before voting for Lindsey again. He thought the ID bill might offset his losses by discouraging Democratic voters to come to the polls. This is his type of “pragmatism.” Oddly enough, he might have done Trump a big favor. Now that he is gone, the Republicans can nominate someone else in his place who may fire MAGA voters back up.

One can’t even imagine how much these two senators are loathed in their home sates. McConnell barely survived Alison Lundergan Grimes back in 2014 and then only because she self-destructed in the waning days of the campaign by coming down to the right of the conservative Kentucky senator on many key issues. She was supposed to be the progressive Democrat.

Lindsey has won multiple elections by default in South Carolina as the conservative opposition to his candidacy has been horribly divided, no more so than in 2014 when a host of candidates ran against him, including a very young Nancy Mace, which effectively split the opposition.

In death and near death, Lindsey and Mitch are more fondly remembered. Even Hunter Biden had this emotional tribute, choosing not to remember when Lindsey led the Senate investigation into his and his father’s work in Ukraine, which led Joe Biden, who had considered Lindsey a longtime friend, to opin “I’m just embarrassed by what you’re doing for you. I mean, my Lord.”

There really is nothing to fondly remember about Lindsey Graham, nor will there be for Mitch McConnell when he finally gives up the ghost. These are two men whose ruthless style of politics was all about their greedy pursuit of power and fulfilling a conservative corporate agenda.

No tears shed here.