The statesmanship deficit

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 15th of July. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Time now for Washington Wednesday.

Senate Republicans are confronting an unexpected transition after the sudden death of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham over the weekend. Graham had become one of President Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, chaired the Budget Committee, and was deeply involved in everything from judicial confirmations to foreign policy.

EICHER: Graham’s sister, Darlene Graham Nordone, will serve the remainder of his term until a special election later this summer. But Graham’s death, coupled with former Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s continuing health problems, raises a broader question: What happens when a generation of institutional knowledge leaves the Senate all at once?

Joining us now to talk about it is Hunter Baker. He’s a senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy.

Good morning, Hunter.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, Lindsey Graham spent more than 30 years in Congress. Beyond the headlines, what does a senator like that actually know that your typical freshman senator simply cannot know?

BAKER: Lindsey Graham is a special figure in the history of the Senate. He has, in addition to his career in the House, he has served multiple terms in the Senate and was widely respected.

So, what he knows is not only the mechanisms of the Senate, the procedures, but also the people and how to gain respect. If you notice, when Lindsey Graham died, he gained favorable comments from people like Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, and in this environment where we see the Democratic Socialists being elected in various offices, and people like Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries being derided as too moderate and too much of sort of compromising figures, there is some risk in in giving respect to Lindsey Graham in the wake of his death, and yet these major figures chose to do so.

I think that says something about the high regard in which he was held and how strong his achievements were.

EICHER: Well, talking about political change, Hunter, Graham’s politics actually changed pretty dramatically over the course of his career, from bipartisan immigration deals, the Gang of 14, that sort of thing to becoming one of Donald Trump’s closest allies in the Senate. How should we see that?

He maintained that respect, but was there a little political opportunism, or would it be an example of just adapting to changes in the party?

BAKER: We have talked about the binary nature of American politics, and it’s basically one or the other. And so, when Donald Trump became the dominant figure in the Republican Party, someone like Lindsey Graham has to make a decision: Does he want to continue to be relevant?

Does he want to continue to matter? Does he want to continue to be able to affect the course of events and to affect policy, or does he want to stand outside and act as a kind of a prophet?

Graham decided he wanted to be an operator, and I think this is the same sort of decision that Marco Rubio made. That he wanted to be able to, he wanted to be relevant.

He wanted to be able to affect policy, and he has obviously done that. I don’t think it’s opportunism so much as I would say it is sort of pragmatic politics in the American context.

MAST: Well, and one of the striking things about Graham is that he seemed to matter whether you agreed with him or not. Are senators today rewarded for becoming institutional players, or primarily for becoming media personalities?

BAKER: To some extent, a figure like him is very hard to replace. Those, those individuals who really master the dynamics of the Senate and who really figure out how to relate to whoever’s in the White House.

They’re very special, and they can operate whether they’re in power or out of power, and they can make a difference. So that’s that’s always going to be there for those who are willing to go to that extent and can figure out how to master the dynamics.

It doesn’t hurt that he was in a completely safe state. South Carolina was never going to throw out Lindsey Graham.

This it’s this sort of new thing that Ben Sasse has talked about, where some of these politicians want to be media personnel. Or TikTok celebrities, or something like that, but those people are rarely going to be affecting policy the way a figure like a Lindsey Graham would.

MAST: Well, Hunter, I want to ask about the South Carolina governor appointing Graham’s sister to finish the remainder of his term. What did you think about that move, especially considering you really can’t practically hand that job to a would-be competitor without tipping the scales in the special election,

BAKER: I think that’s part of what was going on. I think part of it.

I think that President Trump had a special place in his heart for Lindsey Graham, which really says something because Lindsey Graham was a close ally of John McCain and opposed Trump vociferously in the beginning. So, I think that what this shows is that Trump came to respect Lindsey Graham and to really value him, and so Trump is the one who first mentioned that he thought Graham’s sister should be appointed. But I do think that you’re right that what this does is it allows a little time to sort out the politics of who’s going to run to be the Republican nominee in that position, and there are some significant figures in North Carolina, sorry, South Carolina politics who are going to want that job.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, when you put Lindsey Graham’s sudden death together with the decline of Mitch McConnell, his declining health. Are we watching the end of an entire generation of senators who understood the institution differently than the current crop of, of senators and even members of Congress?

BAKER: I certainly hope not. I worry we’ve become increasingly polarized, and there are a lot of incentives to punish people who try to compromise or meet in the middle.

But if we’re going to govern, we need some of that, and we need some of those figures like a Lindsey Graham or a Mitch McConnell or any, any number of others that we might point to who have served that sort of function in the past. I very much hope that we will once again come to value that sort of person and that we will continue that tradition instead of moving into more of a political celebrity type of a mold.

MAST: Well, Hunter, switching gears as we heard from Kent Covington a few minutes ago, Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett testified on Capitol Hill about the need for more security for those sitting on the court due to a rise in threats. Here’s Justice Barrett.

BARRETT: When threats to my life were particularly intense a few years ago around the time of the Dobbs leak. My security details sent me home with a bulletproof vest and I carried it into my house, put it into my bedroom, dropped it down on a table, turned around and my 12-year-old son was standing in the doorway of my bedroom and he wanted to know what it was and why I had it. And I didn't know how to respond because maybe I lack imagination, but I didn't expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one.

And it appears to have gotten worse. Supreme Court police put the rise in threats for this year up by almost 40 percent.

Here’s Justice Kagan.

KAGAN: Our strategy has been consistent across security functions. Expand incrementally but effectively to meet evolving security challenges.

And federal judges generally are also under increasing threats. The 370 so far this year sets the pace at a possible rise there of more than 30 percent.

So, Hunter, what are the political drivers that get us to this point, and is there a way back?

BAKER: I’m very concerned about this sort of direction of things. You may recall that when the legal thriller writer John Grisham first came to prominence, one of his earliest books, The Pelican Brief, later made into a Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts film, was about someone who was assassinating Supreme Court justices in order to affect the balance of power for purposes of changing environmental policy. I think that we have had so much spotlight on the court, and I think largely because of Dobbs, largely because of reversing Roe, that there are more and more people focused on finding ways to change the composition of the court, and so you’ve seen all this talk about packing the court.

You’ve seen these attempts that I think were efforts to change the court. These ethics violations charges, things like that, and I think that yet another angle of that is that you see people who want to try to remove somebody through an assassination or something like that.

So that’s where we are, and we need responsible people right now, primarily on the left, to walk us back away from that.

MAST: Well, speaking of putting the spotlight on the court in a negative way. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the committee, tried to raise the issue of judicial ethics, saying the current ethics rules are “woefully inadequate.”

And she also called for what she called more transparency through financial disclosure. Now, Hunter, that’s a) not what this hearing was about, and b) not anything those two justices have anything to do with. How do you read this?

A member of Congress raising a non-germane issue to try to embarrass Justice Barrett.

BAKER: This gets back to that issue of trying to delegitimize the court. You had all these ethics charges specifically against Alito and Thomas.

I think trying to embarrass them into resigning or to find some, some sort of way to gin up, maybe, an impeachment process or something like that, and here she is sort of this. So we talked about the role of the statesman, the deal maker.

There’s also the role of the indefatigable partisan who goes around trying to kneecap somebody, and that’s what I saw from Rosa DeLauro.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, turning briefly to Iran, where control over the Strait of Hormuz continues to dominate the on part of the on again, off again war. When Trump was pushing the MOU ceasefire, Iran seemed to have him on the political ropes, you know, because of the danger to oil supplies and, therefore, the high cost of energy on the global market, including the U.S. where part of the global market. But does Tehran still hold that kind of leverage?

Do you think, or has the president decided that he’s got the ability now to fight through that disruption until Iran no longer has that credible—and I’m putting in quotation marks here,—“nuclear option” against the world economy that is controlling the Strait.

BAKER: I don’t think that Tehran is in the same position they were when they initially surprised everybody by asserting control over the strait and basically blocking everything up and causing this incredible spike in oil prices. That situation seems more contested now.

There seems to be more ability to get at least some oil through the strait. So they don’t have quite the whip hand that they had, but they, but they do have strength.

And they have, I think I have to say, they have surprised Trump again and again. I’ve talked before about how he expects everybody to act in a rational way, and that is not necessarily going to be the case here.

And Clausewitz famously said that war is the continuation of politics by other means, and I think that we are reaching the state of other means. It’s a, it’s a very bad situation.

I spoke with one foreign policy expert who said rather bluntly, it may come down to figuring out how many people we have to kill. So if we don’t, if we can’t make a deal, it may, we may come down to that sort of a grim calculation.

EICHER: Hunter, before we go, want to thank you for working through one of the hardest trials in your life. You had traveled to be a part of a memorial service for an important mentor in your life, when the very morning of that memorial service, you learned that your own dad had died suddenly.

So you had all of that going on as we were processing the news about Senator Graham. Death really has been an unwelcome theme here the past few days.

BAKER: It has really dominated my life here lately, but I just want to say about my father: death is hard under any circumstances. It’s a little easier when you can look at the legacy of your father, and you can feel really grateful for it.

My father was one of the great family men, a true servant. I wish I could just sit here on the podcast and talk about him for half an hour. But you know one thing that’s relevant to us on Washington Wednesday?

I had a friend who was a community organizer, and he figured out that a very large part of the problems of the poor came down to fatherhood, the lack of effective fathers in the home. My dad did that, and we should call upon everybody who can hear this podcast and who can talk to other people.

Fatherhood is important, and it makes all the difference in the world. And it made all the difference in the world for me.

MAST: Hunter Baker is a senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, and our regular Washington Wednesday analyst, Hunter. Thank you so much.

We’ll see you next week.

BAKER: Thank you.

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