Over the past several years Republican Lindsey Graham has acquired the reputation of a flip-flopper. Once a detractor of Donald J. Trump, the senator from South Carolina is now one of his most loyal allies. As the debate over who will fill the seat of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg heats up, his hypocrisy is taking center stage.
On Friday, following the death of Ginsburg, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that the Senate would confirm Trump’s nominee, despite the country being less than two months away from an election. Over the weekend, Graham said he supported the decision. In 2016, however, Graham’s position was that a SCOTUS nominee should not be installed during the last year of a president’s term. He even went as far as saying Democrats could use his words against him if the situation should ever flip.
Dozens of Democrats have done so and on Monday, more than 100 demonstrators gathered outside the Republican leader’s home in Washington to call the Senator up for reelection a “two-faced coward” and a “hypocrite.”
They also pushed back on his decision to stand in favor of a Senate vote for Trump’s Supreme Court selection. Sunrise Movement DC organized the early-morning protest that included speeches, chants, drums and the now infamous recording of Graham in 2016 saying the next president should choose the nominee.
“If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination and you can use my words against me and you’d be absolutely right,’” Graham said at the time to block then President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.
Jaime Harrison, Graham’s opponent in a close U.S. Senate election, tweeted Graham’s hypocritical decision to support a Senate vote on the matter has rendered his words “worthless.”
Trump has said that his SCOTUS nominee will be named by Friday or Saturday.