Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has passed away.
That's the news I woke up to this morning, and it was unexpected.
"On the evening of Saturday, July 11, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness," Graham's office said in a statement Sunday morning. "Senator Graham's family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period."
There will be plenty of time to catalog Graham's decades in the Senate. But this morning, my mind went straight to one moment: the day Graham saved Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination.
I watched most (if not all) of the Kavanaugh hearings live back in 2018. Democrats were desperate to sink his nomination, and desperate people do desperate things. It was a midterm election year, and Democrats wanted to postpone the confirmation until after the midterms, hoping that Democrats would reclaim the majority in November and that this would force Trump to nominate someone they approved of. So they went looking for a scandal, and Christine Blasey Ford handed them one: an allegation that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers, in an incident she placed sometime in 1982.
Her testimony had holes everywhere. She couldn't say how she got home that night or pin down when exactly the incident happened. None of the witnesses she identified could corroborate her account. None of that stopped the media from treating her as a credible, sympathetic witness while they cast Kavanaugh as a monster.
Watching Democrats work that hearing infuriated me so much that my Apple Watch flagged my heart rate as too high, even though I was just sitting at my desk covering it.
By the time Ford finished testifying, Kavanaugh looked finished too. The momentum had shifted hard against him, and Republicans panicked.
Then Graham got his five minutes.
Graham broke from the script his Republican colleagues had been following and refused to hand his time over to outside prosecutor Rachel Mitchell. He turned straight to Kavanaugh and unloaded.
"Are you aware that at 9:23 on the night of July the 9th, the day you were nominated to the Supreme Court by President Trump, Senator Schumer said, 23 minutes after your nomination, 'I will oppose Judge Kavanaugh's nomination with everything I have, and I hope a bipartisan majority will do the same. The stakes are simply too high for anything less'?" Graham said. "Well, if you weren't aware of it, you are now."
Graham then pressed Kavanaugh on what Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) had done with Ford's allegations, which her staff had already sat on for over 20 days before they surfaced. "If you wanted a FBI investigation, you could have come to us," Graham said. "What you want to do is destroy this guy's life, hold this seat open and hope you win in 2020. You've said that, not me."
“When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them that Lindsey said hello because I voted for them,” Graham said to Kavanaugh before turning back to Democrats. “I would never do to them what you've done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I've been in politics. And if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn't have done what you've done to this guy.”
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“Boy, you all want power,” Graham said to the Democrats. “God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham. That you knew about it and you held it. You had no intention of protecting Dr. Ford; none. She's as much of a victim as you are. God, I hate to say it because these have been my friends.”
Graham also blasted the way Democrats had poisoned the entire process. “This is going to destroy the ability of good people to come forward because of this crap. Your high school yearbook — you have interacted with professional women all your life, not one accusation. You're supposed to be Bill Cosby when you're a junior and senior in high school. And all of a sudden, you got over it. It's been my understanding that if you drug women and rape them for two years in high school, you probably don't stop.”
Graham continued, “Here's my understanding, if you lived a good life people would recognize it, like the American Bar Association has, the gold standard. His integrity is absolutely unquestioned. He is very circumspect in his personal conduct, harbors no biases or prejudices. He's entirely ethical, is a really decent person. He is warm, friendly, unassuming. He's the nicest person — the ABA.”
"To my Republican colleagues, if you vote no, you're legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics," he said.
I disagreed with Senator Lindsey Graham on a number of issues, but this is how I am going to choose to remember him.
— Thomas Hern (@ThomasMHern) July 12, 2026
Fighting for the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Lindsey 2.0 was something else. RIP. pic.twitter.com/HI4D9Eazzw
Make no mistake about it, Graham aimed that speech at three audiences at once. President Trump was watching, and Trump responds to the fighters. Undecided Republican senators needed cover after Ford's performance rattled the room. The American public needed someone to say out loud what everyone on the right was thinking.
It worked. Kavanaugh's odds of confirmation had been sinking before Graham spoke. Afterward, it looked like he had a chance again, and sure enough, he ended up on the Supreme Court. Graham deserves as much credit as anyone for that outcome.
I remember exactly what it felt like watching that hearing live: Kavanaugh looked cooked, and then, in less than five minutes, Graham changed everything. He stopped Democrats from smearing a good man out of a seat he'd earned.
That was Lindsey Graham at his best. Rest in peace, senator.
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