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Lindsey Graham

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Lindsey Graham
United States Senator
from South Carolina
Incumbent
Assumed office
January 7, 2003
Serving with Jim DeMint
Preceded byJ. Strom Thurmond
Succeeded byIncumbent (2009)
Personal details
Political partyRepublican
Spousenone
Alma materUniversity of South Carolina

Lindsey Olin Graham (born July 9, 1955) is an American politician from South Carolina. A member of the Republican Party, he is currently the senior United States Senator from that state. He serves on the Armed Services and Judiciary Committees.

Personal life

Graham was born in Central, South Carolina, where his father, Florence James Graham, owned a liquor store. Graham was the first member of his family to attend college and joined ROTC, hoping to fly, but did not qualify for flying. Because his mother died when he was 21, and his father 15 months later, the service allowed Graham to attend law school in South Carolina so he could be near home and care for his sister, whom he adopted. Upon graduating, and his sister going to college, Graham was sent to Europe as a military prosecutor.

Graham graduated from the University of South Carolina at Columbia with a B.A. in Psychology in 1977 and from its school of law with a J.D. in 1981, and eventually entered private practice as a lawyer. He is a brother of the Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity. Graham never married and has no children. Although never proven, and he has bever said as much there are longstanding rumors that Graham may be gay.

Military service

Graham has served in the United States Air Force since 1982, serving on active duty until 1988, and then in the South Carolina Air National Guard and as an Air Force reservist. During the Gulf War, he was recalled to active duty, serving as a Judge Advocate at McIntire Air National Guard Station in Eastover, South Carolina, where he helped brief departing pilots on the laws of war. In 2004, Graham received a promotion to Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves at a White House ceremony officiated by President George W. Bush.

While in the Air Force Standby Reserve, Graham served as an appellate judge on the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals. In September 2006 the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces ruled that it was a violation of the Incompatibility Clause of the Constitution, which states that "no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office", for Graham to have been a judge on the criminal appeals court.[1]

Political career in the House of Representatives and the Senate

In 1992, Graham was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives from a district in Oconee County. After only one term, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives from the 3rd district in the northwestern part of the state after 20-year incumbent Butler Derrick retired. He won by a surprisingly large margin; the 3rd had never elected a Republican before. In his first reelection bid, in 1996, Debbie Dorn, daughter of longtime 3rd District congressman W.J. Bryan Dorn and Derrick's niece, challenged Graham. However, Graham turned back this challenge fairly easily, and was reelected in 1998 and 2000 with no substantive opposition.

In Congress, Graham quickly became powerful as a member of the Judiciary Committee during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Graham opposed some articles, but vigorously supported others. In January and February of 1999, after two impeachment articles had been passed by the full House, he was one of the managers who brought the House's case to Clinton's trial in the Senate. Though the Senate did not convict Clinton, Graham became nationally known.

He was reelected to the House in 1996, 1998 and 2000. In 2002, upon the retirement of the long-serving Senator Strom Thurmond, the much younger Graham defeated his Democratic opponent, Alex Sanders. He became South Carolina's first new Senator since 1965, and the state's first freshman Republican Senator since Reconstruction. Prior to his controversial position on immigration, he had been heavily favored for reelection in 2008.

McCain-Kennedy Immigration Reform Bill

Graham has been an adamant supporter of "comprehensive immigration reform" and of S. 2611, the McCain-Kennedy Bill of 2006, which is viewed by many as a grant of amnesty to an estimated 12 million illegal aliens, as well as the equally hotly debated S. 1348 of 2007, the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007.

Graham addressed this saying "We are going to solve this problem. We're not going to run people down. We're not going to scapegoat people. We're going to tell the bigots to shut up, and we're going to get this right." [2] He has also compared critics of the bill to anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish bigots [2]

Legislative and Congressional Committees on which Graham has served

SC House of Representatives: Judiciary Committee

US House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

  • United States Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor, and Pensions 2002–2004
  • United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary 2002–present
  • United States Senate Committee on the Armed Services 2002–present
  • United States Senate Committee on the Budget 2004–present

Independent status

Though his stances are often conservative, he has gained a reputation for sometimes speaking out against or criticizing the party line, as well as being open to making compromises. Graham notably supported John McCain's presidential bid in 2000, and has said he would do so again if McCain runs in 2008. Graham votes as a conservative roughly 90 percent of the time, roughly the same as Thurmond's record, but is considered to be more centrist-leaning than his Senate colleague, Jim DeMint. This stance has often aroused the ire of many conservative talk radio hosts especially Mark Levin who nicknames Graham, "Goober Lindsey Graham," as well as conservative bloggers and radio host Rush Limbaugh who refer to him as Senator "Grahamnesty." [3]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Lindsey Graham.

Grassroots efforts to oppose Senator Graham's reelection have arisen due to his positions on judicial nominations and immigration, led by the website DumpGraham.org.[3] Recent polls in South Carolina indicate that Graham's outspoken support of what critics deem "amnesty" for illegal immigrants have driven away many Republican supporters and could cause a primary challenger to emerge in 2008. [4]

Gang of 14

On May 23 2005, Graham was one of the Gang of 14 senators to forge a compromise that brought a halt to the continued blockage of an up or down vote on judicial nomineees. This compromise negated both the Democrats' threatened use of a filibuster and the so-called Republican "nuclear option" as described in the media. Under the agreement, the Democrats would retain the power to filibuster a Bush judicial nominee only in an "extraordinary circumstance", and three conservative Bush appellate court nominees (Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen and William Pryor) would receive a vote by the full Senate.

However, during the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, Graham let it be known that he did not consider Supreme Court nominations to be "extraordinary circumstances." If the Democrats had filibustered these nominations, Graham would have voted to implement the "nuclear option."


Graham Amendment

In July 2005, Graham secured the declassification and release of memorandums outlining concerns made by senior military lawyers as early as 2003 about the legality of the interrogations of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.[4]


In response to this and a June 2004 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing detainees to file habeas corpus petitions to challenge their detentions, Graham authored an amendment[5] to a Department of Defense Authorization Act attempting to clarify the authority of American courts which passed in November 2005 by a vote of 49-42 in the Senate despite opposition from human rights groups and legal scholars because of the lack of rights it provides detainees.[6][7]

Detainee Treatment Act of 2005

The Graham amendment was itself amended by Democratic Senator Carl Levin so that it would not strip the courts of their jurisdiction in cases like Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that had already been granted cert; this compromise version passed by a vote of 84-14, though it did little to satisfy many critics of the original language. The Graham-Levin amendment, combined with Republican Senator John McCain's amendment banning torture, became known as the Detainee Treatment Act and attempted to limit interrogation techniques to those in the U.S. Army Field Manual of Interrogation. Verbal statements by Senators at the time of the amendment's passage indicated that Congress believed that Levin's changes would protect the courts' jurisdiction over cases like Hamdan, though Levin and his cosponsor Senator Kyl placed in the Congressional Record a statement indicating that there would be no change.

In February 2006, Graham joined Senator Jon Kyl in filing an amicus brief in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case which appears to have been an attempt to mislead the Supreme Court by presenting an “extensive colloquy” added to the Congressional record but not included in the Dec 21 debate as evidence that "Congress was aware" that the Detainee Treatment Act would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to hear "pending cases, including this case" brought by the Guantanamo detainees..[8]

Alito Confirmation Hearings

During the Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito for a seat on the United States Supreme Court, Graham was accused by Democrats of having coached Alito before the hearings. Graham did express his support for him during the hearings. One of the most controversial moments of the hearings occurred when Graham asked Alito, "Are you really a closet bigot?" Alito answered "I'm not any kind of a bigot, I'm not." and Graham continued his statement by expressing his opinion that Alito definitely was not a bigot. Alito’s wife cried and left the hearing briefly. [9]

Rosemary Alito, the judge's sister, said that her sister-in-law took the comments as a message of support. Rosemary responded with: "Martha understood them to be kind comments." "It was that expression of warmth, the feeling of support for Sam, that triggered an emotional response." After Samuel Alito's participation in the hearings ended, Martha-Ann Alito gave Graham a quick hug and he responded that he planned to give her children a book compiling "all the documents that we have from so many different people saying nice things about her husband." [5]

Electoral History

South Carolina United States Senate Election 2002
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Republican Lindsey Graham 597,789 54.4
Democratic Alex Sanders 484,798 44.1

Footnotes

  1. ^ United States v. Charles M. Lane (pdf), ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, September 20, 2006
  2. ^ Newt Gingrich on Immigration Bill, Foxnews
  3. ^ [1], DumpGraham.org
  4. ^ Military's Opposition to Harsh Interrogation Is Outlined, New York Times
  5. ^ S8859, The Graham Amendment
  6. ^ ACLU Urges Congress to Reject Court Stripping Measure
  7. ^ Right To Trial Imperiled by Senate Vote by Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith
  8. ^ Invisibile Men : Did Lindsey Graham and Jon Kyl mislead the Supreme Court?, by Emily Bazelon — Slate Magazine
  9. ^ Second Round of Graham Questioning Judge Alito,www.senate.gov
Wikiquote has quotations related to Lindsey Graham.
Template:Incumbent U.S. Senator box
Preceded by Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from South Carolina's 3rd congressional district
1995–2003 		Succeeded by
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