Could Lindsey Graham Really Lose?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2020
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As Lindsey Graham gears up to push the President Trump's nominee through to the Supreme Court, he’s fighting another battle back home in South Carolina -- for his senate seat. The polls have him neck and neck with Democrat Jaime Harrison, but will deep red South Carolina really go blue?
Guest: Megan Kinnard, national political report for Associated Press
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You could make the argument that as the Senate gets to work confirming whoever the president picks to join the Supreme Court, |
| 0:11.0 | one of the politicians with the most at stake here is Lindsay Graham. |
| 0:15.9 | The senator from South Carolina is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, responsible for organizing hearings for the nominee. |
| 0:23.5 | And over the last week, he's become known for a remarkable change of heart about the process |
| 0:29.2 | that's about to unfold. I want you to use my words against me. If there's a Republican president |
| 0:34.7 | in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, |
| 0:39.3 | you can say, Lindsey Graham said, let's let the next president, whoever it might be, make that |
| 0:45.3 | nomination. And you could use my words against me and you'd be absolutely right. |
| 0:49.4 | This was Graham back in 2016, arguing the president should not be able to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat. |
| 0:57.3 | This is something he didn't just say once. He said it multiple times, to multiple people. |
| 1:02.6 | If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump's term and the primary process is started, we'll wait to the next election. |
| 1:14.9 | And I've got a pretty good chance of being the judiciary. You're on the record. Yeah. All right. |
| 1:20.3 | Hold the take. Did you see those videos down in South Carolina? We sure did. I wanted to know how this change of heart was playing with Graham's constituents. |
| 1:30.4 | So I called up the AP's Meg Kinard. |
| 1:33.7 | Those of us who've covered Lindsey Graham a long time are used to hearing him speak his mind, |
| 1:37.4 | but to take a stance that definitive in something that surely has become now a very contentious |
| 1:43.6 | debate over the next Supreme Court nominee. |
| 1:46.9 | You just never know. And he told us to hold the tape. So everybody did. And now we're watching it over and over. |
| 1:56.2 | These gotcha moments, they've already become national political ads because Lindsay Graham, he's up for re-election. |
| 2:04.4 | And the race is surprisingly tight. Meg says the Supreme Court nomination, it's bound to affect his race. |
| 2:12.4 | But for now, it's hard to tell how. |
| 2:15.0 | If voters like what they see, every time they're seeing that very highly visible process play out, that could be a good thing for Senator Graham. |
... |
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