A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022
On Thursday, Graham
doubled down, declaring he still
treated Jackson better than
Democrats treated Kavanaugh.
“Has anybody accused her of
misconduct here? All we tried to
do is prove that her record is one
of judicial activism,” Graham
told conservative radio host
Hugh Hewitt.
For his first 15 years in the
Senate, Graham often played the
role of junior partner to John
McCain, the maverick Arizona
Republican senator who died in
August 2018. In the last couple of
years of Trump’s term, Graham
fell in line as golfing pal to a
president who often publicly
maligned McCain even after his
death.
Last weekend, on the eve of
Jackson’s hearings, Graham
wasn’t completely engrossed in
her legal briefing books. He flew
to West Palm Beach for some
political fundraising work,
crossed the bridge into Palm
Beach for dinner with Trump at
Mar-a-Lago on Friday and
Saturday, then played golf
Sunday with Greg Norman, the
Australian ex-PGA Tour star who
is trying to start a rival golf
league backed by Saudi
investors.
With McCain gone and Trump
in the political wilderness, the
career wingman now needs to
chart his own path.
If Republicans win in
November, Grassley, 88, will
wield the gavel for Judiciary and
Graham will be chairman of the
Budget Committee.
Never much of his focus,
Graham said he would use the
Budget Committee gavel to pull
together some members of an
independent commission that
studied the national debt early
last decade.
“Tell me again what you were
trying to do,” Graham said he
would ask, hoping to create a
“blueprint” to curb the $
trillion national debt.
If Graham had his druthers,
Biden would have nominated
Judge J. Michelle Childs of South
Carolina instead of Jackson. He
pledged to vote for Childs’s
promotion to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit, set to be taken
up later this spring.
But will he support Childs for
the Supreme Court next year if
there’s a vacancy and
Republicans are in charge?
Maybe, but he thinks he would
use that as leverage to start a
broader negotiation on how to
treat all nominees when the
Senate and president are at
political odds.
“Okay, I may vote for Judge
Childs,” he said in an imaginary
conversation. “What are you
going to do to our people? I want
a rule that applies to all of us.”top defense of the nominee that
briefly made him a conservative
hero.
“I had a starring role ... and I
am not looking for that,” Graham
said. “I think if you want to get
the best and brightest to sign up
to be judges, we’re going to have
to turn it down.”
Yet on the third day of
Jackson’s hearings, Graham, 66,
now in his fourth term, made no
attempt to turn things down as
he followed his more junior GOP
colleagues into a legal gutter
over her sentencing record on
child pornography.
Graham said her sentences
made “it easier for the children
to be exploited.” In theatrical
fashion, he interrupted the judge
and shouted at Durbin when he
tried to constrain Graham to his
allotted time.
“All I can say is that your view
on how to deter child
pornography is not my view,”
Graham said.
Democrats were left shaking
their fists at someone who
promised to treat the nominee
with respect.
“Lindsey is a good friend and a
complicated person. Complex
person, that’s better, complex
person, and I’m doing my best to
still find an avenue where we can
work together,” Durbin said
Thursday.circuit court nominees when he
was a first-term senator, citing
poor treatment of conservative
jurists who were minorities.
Most viewers were perplexed
by his initial line of questions —
“On a scale of 1 to 10, how
faithful would you say you are?”
— and whether Jackson could
judge Catholics fairly. He
admitted later those questions
were out of bounds but said he
was trying to make a point about
how Democrats questioned
Barrett’s Catholicism in her 2017
confirmation hearing to a circuit
court seat.
“I’m trying to make a point.
That I don’t believe there’s an
ounce of religious bigotry in her.
But if you’re offended by that,
you should have really been
offended by [what happened to]
Amy Coney Barrett,” he said in
an interview during a break
Tuesday.
Whether his intentions were
understood or not, Graham
claimed he wanted to set a
different tone for Jackson’s
hearings and for future
nominees. In the interview,
Graham said he wanted to end
the circuslike atmosphere of the
Kavanaugh hearings, capped off
by an allegation of sexual assault
while he was a teenager, which
Kavanaugh has vigorously
denied, and Graham’s over-the-election year. It’s something
Republicans concocted to justify
holding Scalia’s court seat vacant
following his death in February
2016, allowing Trump to later
nominate Neil M. Gorsuch.
Republicans amended this “rule”
in 2020 when Ruth Bader
Ginsburg died fewer than two
months before the presidential
election, declaring that since the
Senate and White House were of
the same party they could rush
through Barrett’s confirmation.
The tricky situation, Graham
said, is if Thomas or another
justice were to die in 2023,
before the actual primaries and
caucuses start in the presidential
campaign.
“This is sort of uncharted
territory,” he said.
It’s not, really. Senate
Democrats approved John Paul
Stevens as a justice in late 1975
and Anthony M. Kennedy in
early 1988, confirming Supreme
Court nominees of an opposing
party’s president just before the
campaign started.
But Graham views everything
differently after the last two
decades in the trenches of the
judicial wars.
Over the first two days of
Jackson’s hearings, he spent
most of his time re-litigating past
grievances about how Democrats
had treated George W. Bush’syear.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-
Iowa) would become the
Judiciary Committee chairman
and, in a brief interview, he
declined to even consider how he
would handle a Supreme Court
vacancy.
“That would be like me hoping
somebody’s going to die on the
Supreme Court — I’m not going
to think that way,” said Grassley,
88, who used seniority to nudge
Graham aside last year. “This is
kind of a religious answer to
your question, but there’s also a
secular answer: Let go, let God,
just take a day at a time.”
But Justice Clarence Thomas’s
recent illness, an infection that
resulted in a week-long stay at
Sibley Hospital that was only
supposed to last a couple of days,
brought the issue squarely into
the spotlight.
And Graham, the always
loquacious lightning rod of the
Senate, openly wondered and
gamed out the potential
scenarios.
Should a Supreme Court
vacancy occur in 2024, Graham
said, “the Garland rule” takes
effect and Republicans will not
contemplate processing a Biden
nominee in the election year.
There is, in fact, no “rule”
preventing the opposing party
from processing a nominee in anSen. Lindsey O.
Graham (R-S.C.)
looked briefly into
the future and
saw a calamitous
confirmation process for
Supreme Court justices and
other federal judge nominees: a
near total blockade.
With Republicans needing a
simple one-seat gain in
November to retake control of
the Senate, Graham pointed to
the Supreme Court fight in 2020
when not a single Democrat
voted to confirm Justice Amy
Coney Barrett as an ominous
precedent for how a GOP
majority would behave toward
President Biden’s picks.
“Is that the new norm? If
that’s going to be the new norm,”
Graham asked, “what do you do
when one party has the Senate
and the other party has the
White House? How do you ever
get anybody confirmed?”
Graham is nowhere near as
relevant now as in previous
years, when he oversaw Barrett’s
confirmation as chairman of the
Judiciary Committee and played
a key role in turning the tide at
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s
hearing in 2018 when he
passionately defended the
nominee and accused Democrats
of “the most unethical sham
since I’ve been in politics.”
But senior Republicans and
Democrats agree with Graham
that a judicial confirmation
process that is already painfully
partisan — as demonstrated by
four long days of hearings over
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s
nomination to the Supreme
Court — could turn even more
toxic.
Democrats recall the last two
years of Barack Obama’s
presidency when Sen. Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.), then majority
leader, set up barricades around
the top judiciary posts. Just two
nominees to the circuit courts of
appeal were confirmed in 2015
and 2016, the lowest two-year
tally since the 19th century.
When Justice Antonin Scalia
died in February 2016,
McConnell refused to even meet
with Merrick Garland, Obama’s
nominee, let alone give him a
hearing or a vote.
Democrats are bracing for
worse treatment next year if
Republicans take charge.
“I can’t remember anything
quite like it, with a Democratic
president and a Senate in
different hands. I don’t know
where we’d go,” Sen. Richard J.
Durbin (D-Ill.), chairman of the
Judiciary Committee, said after
Jackson’s hearings concluded
Thursday.
Durbin said his focus is on
“using every available” moment
to keep confirming Biden’s
nominees before the end of theGraham predicts an ever more toxic confirmation process for judicial nominees@PKCapitol
PAUL KANEJABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) spent most of his time in the first two days of hearings over Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to
the Supreme Court re-litigating past grievances about how Democrats had treated George W. Bush’s circuit court nominees.least my time in DC on it.”
Thomas thanked Meadows
with multiple exclamation points
and added, “I will try to keep
holding on. America is worth it!”
The fiction of a stolen election
continues today, causing
problems inside the party. David
Perdue, the former senator from
Georgia who was defeated in
2020 and is now running for
governor, is claiming that not
only was Trump’s election stolen,
but his own was as well. In
Wisconsin, the Republican
speaker of the state assembly,
Robin Vos, is caught up in an
ongoing mess related to a review
of the 2020 election — a mess
partly of his own making as he
sought to satisfy Trump’s claims
of theft.
It might be easy for senior
Republican officials to dismiss
Thomas’s texts as the work of
someone who represents only
the most far-right fringe of the
party. But that’s an escape from
the continuing influence and
downright domination of
Trump’s leadership of the
Republican Party.
Thomas’s fear of a takeover by
the left binds the Republican
Party together. Many on the left
have similar worries about what
Republican control of the
government — and especially a
return of Trump to the White
House — would mean for the
country.
What makes the two sides
different is how many
Republicans who otherwise have
broken with Trump on his
baseless claims of a stolen
election, and who might see
Ginni Thomas as having gone off
the rails in the weeks after the
election, nonetheless say they
will vote for Trump if he becomes
the party’s 2024 nominee. That,
too, sums up the state of the
party.actors were involved. But the
texts with Meadows — and his
replies — offer undeniable
evidence that the president’s
closest advisers were in the thick
of trying to find a way to delay
the certification process and
possibly stop Biden from taking
office.
Maybe that isn’t news to a lot
of people. After all, there is
ample proof from post-election
books by journalists and others,
as well as new information that
has come out of the work of the
Jan. 6 committee, that the efforts
to obstruct Biden’s certification
and possibly overturn the
election were serious, concerted
and involved high-ranking
officials.
Nor is it news how many
Republican officials around the
country were prepared to
participate in the effort, despite
the absence of real evidence.
When Texas Attorney General
Ken Paxton filed a flawed lawsuit
to have results in four states
overturned, the suit was
eventually joined by 18
Republican state attorneys
general and 126 House
Republicans, including House
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy
(R-Calif.).
The Thomas-Meadows texts
provide a behind-the-scenes look
at how the battle was being cast
and the angst and emotional
energy that was being invested
in that fight.
On Nov. 10, Thomas texted
Meadows and pleaded with him
to prevent Biden “and the left”
from carrying out “the greatest
Heist of our history.”
Meadows replied, “This is a
fight of good versus evil. Evil
always looks like the victor until
the King of Kings triumphs. Do
not grow weary in well doing.
The fight continues. I have
staked my career on it. Well atwere truly statements of fact.”
Ginni Thomas, however,
promoted these conspiracies
with the White House chief of
staff as if she believed them.
For anyone who thought that
Trump’s claims of a stolen
election were a game to salve a
bruised presidential ego and that
those around him went along to
humor him, the Thomas texts
speak to the real threats that
existed at the time. To Thomas,
this was deadly serious, because
she saw Trump as a bulwark
against what she apparently
believed was a threatening
liberal movement. The texts
suggest she was driven by
ideology.
She was not alone in pushing
to overturn the election. Lots ofassertions of malevolent
computer tampering with
election results from afar, of
Dominion Voting Systems
servers using software created at
the direction of Venezuela’s
Hugo Chávez, and on and on.
These allegations were
advanced without evidence by
Trump legal adviser Sidney
Powell and by Rudolph W.
Giuliani, who was acting as the
president’s lawyer and who once
was a respected mayor of New
York and Justice Department
official. So outlandish were
Powell’s conspiracies that, in
response to a lawsuit by
Dominion against Powell and
others, her attorney said, “No
reasonable person would
conclude that the statementspartisan politics has splashed
onto the high court. He was the
lone dissenter in the court’s
ruling that Trump had to turn
over documents to the House
committee. His reasons for the
dissent were never publicly
explained. He is now under
much greater pressure to recuse
himself from any future
decisions related to these
matters, and some Democrats
are calling on him to resign.
The shock value of the
Thomas-Meadows texts goes
without saying. The underlying
implications are more
troublesome. Ginni Thomas was
not someone in a Proud Boys cell
or living on the fringes of the
Republican Party. She has
straddled hard-right activism
and establishment politics for
decades, operating for years in
the most rarefied circles within
the conservative movement.
If not true conservative
royalty, the Thomases come
awfully close to it. Justice
Thomas’s long record as one of
the most conservative members
of the Supreme Court is
indisputable. His wife has
collected accolades of her own as
an activist on the far right. They
have said many times that their
professional lives are kept
separate, though their causes are
certainly shared.
Now it’s known just how much
Ginni Thomas pushed senior
officials in the government to
embrace allegations that were
unproved at the time and
ultimately disproved, claims that
embodied some of the most
outlandish of the ideas that were
circulating then.
The “kraken” — a
mythological multi-armed sea
monster — to which she referred
included such things asTHE SUNDAY TAKE FROM A
THE SUNDAY TAKE
Fiction of stolen election, emphasized in Ginni Thomas’s texts, continues todayCHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
V irginia “Ginni” Thomas moderates a panel at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference in
Maryland. Her text messages have put Justice Clarence Thomas in an uncomfortable ethical position.“This is a fight of goodversus evil. Evil alwayslooks like the victoruntil the King of Kingstriumphs. Do not growweary in well doing.The fight continues.”
Chief of Staff Mark Meadows,
in a text reply to Ginni Thomas