Lindsey Graham

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Lindsey Graham
Senior Senator from South Carolina
Incumbent
Assumed office  January 7, 2003– Serving with Jim DeMint
Preceded by	J. Strom Thurmond
Succeeded by	Incumbent (2009)
Born	July 09, 1955 (age 51) Central, South Carolina
Political party	Republican
Spouse	none
Religion	Southern Baptist

Lindsey Olin Graham (born July 9, 1955) is an American politician from South Carolina. A member of the Republican Party, he is currently the senior United States Senator from that state. He serves on the Armed Services and Judiciary Committees.

[edit] Personal life

Graham was born in Central, South Carolina, where his father owned a liquor store. Graham was the first member of his family to attend college and joined ROTC, hoping to fly, but did not qualify for flying. Because his mother died when he was 21, and his father 15 months later, the service allowed Graham to attend law school in South Carolina so he could be near home and care for his sister, whom he adopted. Upon graduating, and his sister going to college, Graham was sent to Europe as a military prosecutor.

Graham graduated from the University of South Carolina at Columbia with a B.A. in Psychology in 1977 and from its school of law with a J.D. in 1981, and eventually entered private practice as a lawyer. He is a brother of the Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity. Graham has never married.

[edit] Military service

Graham has served in the United States Air Force since 1982, serving on active duty until 1988, and then in the South Carolina Air National Guard and as an Air Force reservist. During the Gulf War, he was recalled to active duty, serving as a Judge Advocate at McIntire Air National Guard Station in Eastover, South Carolina, where he helped brief departing pilots on the laws of war. In 2004, Graham received a promotion to Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves at a White House ceremony officiated by President George W. Bush.

While in the Air Force Standby Reserve, Graham served as an appellate judge on the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals. In September 2006 the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces ruled that it was a violation of the Incompatibility Clause of the Constitution, which states that "no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office", for Graham to have been a judge on the criminal appeals court.^[1]

[edit] Political career in the House of Representatives and the Senate

In 1992, Graham was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives from a district in Oconee County. After only one term, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives from the 3rd district in the northwestern part of the state after 20-year incumbent Butler Derrick retired. He won by a surprisingly large margin; the 3rd had never elected a Republican before. In his first reelection bid, in 1996, Debbie Dorn, daughter of longtime 3rd District congressman W.J. Bryan Dorn and Derrick's niece, challenged Graham. However, Graham turned back this challenge fairly easily, and was reelected in 1998 and 2000 with no substantive opposition.

In Congress, Graham quickly became powerful as a member of the Judiciary Committee during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Graham opposed some articles, but vigorously supported others. In January and February of 1999, after two impeachment articles had been passed by the full House, he was one of the managers who brought the House's case to Clinton's trial in the Senate. Though the Senate did not convict Clinton, Graham became nationally known.

He was reelected to the House in 1996, 1998 and 2000. In 2002, upon the retirement of the long-serving Senator Strom Thurmond, the much younger Graham defeated his Democratic opponent, Alex Sanders. He became South Carolina's first new Senator since 1965, and the state's first freshman Republican Senator since Reconstruction. He is heavily favored for reelection in 2008.

Sen. Graham debates with Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), Chairman of United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Meet the Press with Tim Russert. Graham has been heralded by conservatives as being one of the best public defenders of President George W. Bush's policy in Iraq.

[edit] Views on Immigration

Graham has been an adamant supporter of so-called "comprehensive immigration reform" and of S. 2611, the McCain-Kennedy Bill, which would grant relief status to 10-12 million illegal aliens.

[edit] Legislative and Congressional Committees on which Graham has served

SC House of Representatives: Judiciary Committee

US House of Representatives

• U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce 1995-2002
• U.S. House Committee on International Relations 1995-1998
• U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security1995-1997 (National Security at the time)
• U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary 1997-2002
• U.S. House Committee on Armed Services 1999-2002

U.S. Senate

• United States Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor, and Pensions 2002-2004
• United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary 2002-present
• United States Senate Committee on the Armed Services 2002-present
• United States Senate Committee on the Budget 2004-present

[edit] Independent status

Though his stances are often conservative, he has gained a reputation for sometimes speaking out against or criticizing the party line, as well as being open to making compromises. Graham notably supported John McCain's presidential bid in 2000, and has said he would do so again if McCain runs in 2008. Graham votes as a conservative roughly 90 percent of the time, roughly the same as Thurmond's record, but is considered to be more independent-minded than his Senate colleague, Jim DeMint.

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Lindsey Graham

[edit] Gang of 14

On May 23, 2005, Graham was one of the Gang of 14 senators to forge a compromise that brought a halt to the continued blockage of an up or down vote on judicial nomineees. This compromise negated both the Democrats' threatened use of a filibuster and the so-called Republican "nuclear option" as described in the media. Under the agreement, the Democrats would retain the power to filibuster a Bush judicial nominee only in an "extraordinary circumstance", and three conservative Bush appellate court nominees (Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen and William Pryor) would receive a vote by the full Senate.

However, during the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, Graham let it be known that he did not consider Supreme Court nominations to be "extraordinary circumstances." If the Democrats had filibustered these nominations, Graham would have voted to implement the "nuclear option."

[edit] Detainee Treatment

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Sen. Graham has repeatedly stated that US military and intelligence personnel in future wars will suffer for abuses committed in 2006 by the US in the name of fighting terrorism. He fears that the administration’s civilian lawyers and a president who never saw combat are putting US service personnel at risk of torture, summary executions and other atrocities by chipping away at Geneva Conventions’ standards that have protected them since 1949. A rival bill gives defendants access to classified evidence being used to convict them and will set tight limits on use of testimony obtained by coercion. Furthermore it offers CIA interrogators some legal protections from charges of abuse, but rejects the administration’s plan to more narrowly define the Geneva Conventions’ standards for humane treatment of prisoners. So he creates a nightmare for George W. Bush and Republican leaders trying to depict Democrats as soft on terrorism in their bid to keep control of United States Congress in November 7, 2006 midterm elections. He sees the billing which should rather clarify the US treaty obligations as a withdrawing from the treaty obligations, which will set a precedent that could come back to haunt America he told on September 15, 2006. This issue is irrelevant for Republican re-election. "It is about those who take risks to defend America". ^[2]

[edit] Graham Amendment

In July 2005, Graham secured the declassification and release of memorandums outlining serious and detailed concerns by senior military lawyers as early as 2003 about the legality of the harsh interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay which appeared to violate domestic and international law.^[3]

In response to this and a June 2004 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing detainees to file habeas corpus petitions to challenge their detentions, Graham authored an amendment^[4] to a Department of Defense Authorization Act attempting to clarify the authority of American courts which passed in November 2005 by a vote of 49-42 in the Senate despite strong opposition from many human rights groups and legal scholars because of its restrictions on the rights of detainees to challenge the use of torture.^[5][6]

[edit] Detainee Treatment Act of 2005

The Graham amendment was itself amended by Democratic Senator Carl Levin so that it would not strip the courts of their jurisdiction in cases like Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that had already been granted cert; this compromise version passed by a vote of 84-14, though it did little to satisfy many critics of the original language. The Graham-Levin amendment, combined with Republican Senator John McCain's amendment banning torture, became known as the Detainee Treatment Act and attempted to limit interrogation techniques to those in the U.S. Army Field Manual of Interrogation. Verbal statements by Senators at the time of the amendment's passage indicated that Congress believed that Levin's changes would protect the courts' jurisdiction over cases like Hamdan, though Levin and his cosponsor Senator Kyl placed in the Congressional Record a statement indicating that there would be no change.

In February 2006, Graham joined Senator Jon Kyl in filing an amicus brief in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case which appears to have been an attempt to mislead the Supreme Court by presenting an “extensive colloquy” added to the Congressional record but not included in the Dec 21st debate as evidence that "Congress was aware" that the Detainee Treatment Act would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to hear "pending cases, including this case" brought by the Guantanamo detainees..^[7]

[edit] Alito Confirmation Hearings

During the Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito for a seat on the United States Supreme Court, Graham was accused by Democrats of having coached Alito before the hearings. Graham did express his support for him during the hearings. One of the most controversial moments of the hearings occurred when Graham asked Alito, "Are you really a closet bigot?" Alito answered no and Graham continued his statement by expressing his opinion that Alito definitely was not a bigot. Alito’s wife cried and left the hearing briefly.

Rosemary Alito, the judge's sister, said that her sister-in-law took the comments as a message of support. Rosemary responded with: "Martha understood them to be kind comments." "It was that expression of warmth, the feeling of support for Sam, that triggered an emotional response." After Samuel Alito's participation in the hearings ended, Martha-Ann Alito gave Graham a quick hug and he responded that he planned to give her children a book compiling "all the documents that we have from so many different people saying nice things about her husband." [1]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• United States Senator Lindsey Graham official Senate site
• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Senate Republican Caucus - Senator Lindsey Graham
• Federal Election Commission - Lindsey Olin Graham campaign finance reports and data
• New York Times - Lindsey Graham News collected news and commentary
• On the Issues - Lindsey Graham issue positions and quotes
• OpenSecrets.org - Lindsey Graham campaign contributions
• Project Vote Smart - Senator Lindsey Graham (SC) profile
• SourceWatch Congresspedia - Lindsey Graham profile
• Washington Post - Congress Votes Database: Lindsey Graham voting record
• "Swing Conservative: The perilous bipartisanship of Lindsey Graham." Washington Monthly, April 2005
• "The American Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" by Sam Provance