Lindsey Graham's rage was a threat to his fellow Republicans: Close ranks or else

The Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault hearing completed Sen. Lindsey Graham’s transformation into a mini-Trump, and he made it official Thursday night on Sean Hannity’s show, saying that “I am now more convinced than ever that he didn’t do it” and “Ms. Ford has a problem and destroying Judge Kavanaugh’s life won’t fix her problem.” But before that, Graham had made a strong showing of where he was going when he took over his question time from Rent-a-Schlafly Rachel Mitchell, grandstanding like there’s a special Emmy for Best Performance in a Senate Hearing, and said, among other things, this:

“To my Republican colleagues, if you vote 'no', you're legitimizing the most despicable thing that I have seen in my time in politics."

That—both the words and the rage behind them—was a threat. The angry closing of ranks most flagrantly embodied by Graham but not restricted to him was a message to Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins and possibly Jeff Flake that, if they held up the vote or got squeamish about things like needing an FBI investigation, they would not only face the rage of the Republican base but of their Republican Senate colleagues. That they would be outcasts. 

Graham, with his “to my Republican colleagues,” may have been the most explicit about what was going on, but Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) gave the same sense, saying that “I can’t think of a more embarrassing scandal for the United States Senate since the McCarthy hearings”—so anyone who thinks maybe the hearings exposed a problem was the new McCarthy. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) struck the same note, saying that “This has been one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the United States Senate.” (He’s not wrong, but the shame isn’t going in the direction he was claiming.)

But if you’re Murkowski or Collins or Flake, the message is clear: This hearing made it more, not less, central to Republican identity and in-group status to vote for Kavanaugh. Republicans were forced to listen to a damn woman, the sham of their Supreme Court manipulations was exposed a little more, and the likelihood that some Republican somewhere would get cold feet and vote no, for the sake of their public reputation if nothing else, had grown slightly larger. The palpable rage coming from Judiciary Committee Republicans was both the fear that that would happen and the message to the people who might be considering it.

We have to fight tooth and nail to keep this party from continuing to control the Senate. Can you give $3 to elect Democrats in Nevada and Texas?