Let’s Be Honest About Lindsey Graham’s Record

SITUATION:

Senator Lindsey Graham died Saturday, July 11, 2026, at 71, hours after returning from a trip to Ukraine. A preliminary finding listed aortic dissection as the likely cause of death.

The tributes that followed described a dealmaker, a foreign policy hand, and a loyal ally to two Republican presidents. A full accounting of a 23-year Senate career should also include the parts that don’t fit politely into a eulogy.

Graham built a brand around principle. On several of the issues that mattered most, the actual record moved with the political winds far more than that brand implied.

THE TRUTH:

Graham spent years as one of the loudest supporters of post-9/11 surveillance powers, telling colleagues in 2017 that intelligence agencies could not be handcuffed every time someone got nervous about Constitutionally protected civil liberties. He voted to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA repeatedly and pushed to make elements of it permanent, brushing aside legitimate privacy concerns.

That put him at odds for years with a large and consistent bloc of conservatives and libertarians (liberals, too), the kind who backed Rand Paul’s filibusters and never accepted the premise that safety requires trading away Fourth Amendment protections. Graham refused to sway in that debate. He was one of the loudest voices telling the defenders of civil liberties to get over it.

Graham’s position changed 180 degrees once the tool in question was used against Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign who became the target of a FISA warrant during the FBI’s Russia investigation. Graham, by then Judiciary Committee chairman, made the bold claim that the FISA court itself might need to be eliminated after an inspector general found serious errors in the warrant process used to surveil Page.

Reports surfaced in 2025 that Graham himself had been swept up in a similar surveillance effort, at which point his objections against the FISA court grew sharper. The civil liberties argument the skeptics had been making for two decades suddenly became urgent to Graham once he was on the other end of the warrant.

A similar pattern showed up during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight in 2018. Graham’s furious floor defense of the Supreme Court Justice nominee became one of the most replayed moments of his career. Critics at the time noted his intensity stood in contrast to how measured Graham had been in other moments involving allegations against people that happened to be outside his own political circle.

The clearest example remains the 2021 Trump impeachment vote. On January 6, hours after the Capitol riot, Graham told the Senate his journey with Trump had reached its end, said enough was enough, and voted to certify Biden’s win. Five weeks later he flipped by voting to acquit Trump on the same conduct, calling the trial an exercise in passion and hatred against the president. Nothing about the underlying facts of the January 6 insurrection attempt changed in the interim.

On government spending, Graham’s track record is equally lopsided. He spent years warning about the national debt and positioning himself as a check on runaway government spending. When it came time to vote on major tax and spending packages during the Trump years, packages that have already exploded the deficit to record-high levels, Graham supported them.

WHY IT MATTERS:

Lindsey Graham’s words and voting records have shown a long track record of being highly situational, often depending on whether he’s on the receiving end or not. He also shifted his loyalties and principles, seemingly without justification or cause.

The surveillance record is the clearest test case, because the underlying principle, based on the Constitutional protection against illegal search and seizure and warrantless surveillance, was never a partisan issue to begin with. Conservatives and libertarians who oppose warrantless government snooping have held that position regardless of who occupies the White House or whose campaign gets swept up in it. Graham held the opposite position just as consistently, until the day he became the target of that surveillance.

That is not a change of heart. It is what happens when a position was never about the principle in the first place, only about whichever side of the debate served Graham’s interests at the time. The same shape repeats across the Kavanaugh defense, the certify-then-acquit vote, and the deficit hawk who financed massive budget deficits.

Despite the eulogies and kind words expressed after Graham’s death, none of that changes what the record actually shows on the issues where it mattered most: a senator whose convictions bent toward whatever kept him standing closest to power, not the other way around.