As a born-and-raised, current resident of South Carolina, many of us were shocked to find that our United States Senator, Lindsey Graham, had died unexpectedly at the age of 71. While there are naturally some conspiracy theories about his death, this is not what this blog post is about. As someone who succeeded Strom Thurmond to a Senate seat, Lindsey Graham spent well over most of my lifetime either in the House of Representatives or the United States Senate, being a complete embarrassment to all decency just like his predecessor.

In the late ’90s, he gained some notoriety for being one of the House Republicans who was strongly against Bill Clinton and spearheaded an aggressive campaign to have him impeached and removed from office due to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He even said that impeachment doesn’t require an actual crime and that witnesses were definitely needed. Yet when Donald Trump was impeached, he did a complete 180, saying that witnesses were never needed and the whole thing was a crock. While Lindsey Graham has been known to be a flip-flopper like Mitt Romney on certain issues, when it comes down to it, he would be a partisan sheep.

Which I think is rather ironic considering that, even though he never officially confirmed it, one of the worst-kept secrets in South Carolina politics was that Lindsey Graham almost certainly preferred the company of men. Apparently, in the D.C. circle of men who were hired to “entertain” other men behind closed doors, his nickname was Lady G. Now, if all these things are true, and I have no reason to doubt them, it’s amazing that a man from the LGBTQ+ community was such a thorn in the side of his own group of people. He wasn’t technically super adamant on the issue, but when it came down to a vote, he almost always sided with traditional Christian Southern Baptist thinking.

Now, technically, Graham had a fairly successful Senate career, at least in getting certain bills passed. Some of them weren’t super bad, like some bipartisan initiatives, but some of them were actually pretty bad, like being Trump’s lapdog on tax cuts for rich people and harsh ICE policies. He was also quite a vocal supporter of military interventionism, which I think he was mostly wrong about, as we as a country spend far too much on our military and have our soldiers in too many places where we don’t need to be. The only thing I really agreed with him on was his commitment to Ukraine fighting their defensive war against Russia. I’m surprised it did not cause more of a strained relationship between him and Donald Trump.

The funny thing is that most hardcore Republicans in South Carolina never really loved Lindsey Graham, but the late senator was often like a political snake. He knew how to slither to the right when he needed to and to the left when he needed to, and he certainly didn’t make the mistake of becoming Donald Trump’s enemy after Trump kept winning every primary since 2016. Ironically, he was once anti-Trump and had the famous quote that Trump would destroy the Republican Party. But what most people are going to remember him for in his later years was being Trump’s personal little pet. Unfortunately, it’s very likely that a Republican will win his seat in the permanent election this November, as it’s probably going to take at least another decade for South Carolina to develop enough brain cells to realize that the Republican Party is like a cancer to decency.