Over the past couple of weeks, Senator Lindsey Graham's behavior has made me wonder if he has gone, in the immortal phrase of the late George V. Higgins, as soft as church music. This matters a great deal because he is now the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, through which federal judicial nominations must go. On Monday, he gave an interview in which Graham, who regularly deplores Democratic senators for "politicizing" the nomination process, and who went completely batshit crazy during the hearings into Brett Kavanaugh's nomination, made it quite clear for whom he's really working.

He did it by summoning up the red-faced hysteria that he'd employed during the extended debate over Weekends With PJ and Squi. From FNC:

"My Democratic colleagues felt when they were in charge we should confirm judges by a majority vote," Graham told Fox News' Chris Wallace. "They changed the rules to accommodate President Obama. They tried to stack the court. They never thought [Hillary] Clinton would lose. So what you’re gonna have is Harry Reid’s and Chuck Schumer’s desire to stack the court on their Democratic watch has come back to haunt them...

"If there is an opening, whether it’s Ginsburg or anybody else, I will urge the president to nominate a qualified conservative and hopefully those people will get through – that person will get through," Graham continued. "And I expect it to be along party lines, and this is what happens when you change the rules. This has come back to bite ' em. I predicted it would. And we’ll see. I hope Justice Ginsburg serves for a long time. But if there’s an opening on this court, I’m going to be hell-bent to put a conservative to replace whoever steps down for whatever reason."

Mark Wilson Getty Images

"They should’ve thought of that before they changed the rules," Graham responded. "They tried to destroy conservative judges. I voted for [Sonia] Sotomayor and [Elena] Kagan, understanding what I was getting, so this decision by Reid and Schumer may come back to haunt them, but I am dead set on making sure it is a conservative nominee. And elections have consequences. The rules of the Senate were changed not by me, by them, and we had to do it on the Supreme Court because they would not give us any votes to nominate anybody. And Kavanaugh was a fine man, they tried to destroy him. All this is going to come back to haunt them one day."

Anyone with any information regarding the disappearance of onetime Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland should contact the local authorities immediately.

In addition, Senator Graham seemed befuddled about what his actual opinion on the government shutdown should be.

"I would urge him to open up the government for a short period of time, like three weeks, before he pulls the plug," Graham said. "See if we can get a deal. If we can’t at the end of three weeks, all bets are off. See if he can do it by himself through the emergency powers. That’s my recommendation. But I think the legislative path is just about shut off because Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the House, said ‘Even if you open up the government, I’ll give you one dollar for the wall.’ As long as that’s the case, we’re never gonna get a legislative package, no matter what the Senate does."

This, of course, makes utterly no sense. Open the government for three weeks and then close it again, this time on at best dubious constitutional grounds? And for the purposes of seizing land for the big, beautiful, stupid wall? That would be a schizoid move even for this administration*. But it is of a piece with Graham's strange relationship with this president*, whom he once reviled, but whose policies Graham would like to take to dinner and a show.

A group of Republicans pretends this is normal. Bill Clark Getty Images

Even weirder was the behavior of Mark Meadows, the chairman of the House "Freedom" Caucus who, over the weekend, tweeted out that the administration* should pay for the big, beautiful, stupid wall through the proceeds from asset forfeiture, which people of his ilk once hated as much as they hated eminent domain, on which many conservative politicians have flipped as well. The president*'s ability to provoke self-destruction among his putative allies continues to be remarkable. The question remains why that's still the case.

I don't think it has anything to do with compromising videos or any similar tradecraft. I think it's all about money. We already know that the National Rifle Association functioned as a laundromat for money originating with the Volga Bagmen. And we know that Russian money did indeed find its way into Republican campaigns other than that of the president*, largely via the NRA. If there was laundered Russian money running through a number of Republican campaigns, you might conceivably get the kind of ADHD politics being practiced by the likes of Lindsey Graham—who likes to say he's only hoisting Democrats on their own petard, but, instead, seems to be hoisting all of us on his own.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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