Graham is crackers

Get your head around this if you can: Sen. Lindsey Graham Thursday unveiled a resolution condemning House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, on the grounds that it has proceeded to date largely behind closed doors.

Graham is the man who, as a Republican member of the House in 1999, voted articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton out of the Judiciary Committee almost entirely on the basis of the behind-closed-doors investigation of one Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

He is the man who, as a manager of the impeachment when Clinton went to trial in the Senate, argued that a president who lied under oath about a consensual sexual relationship should be removed because, “You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role.”

And who back then said, “The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is that day that he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress and he became the judge and jury.”

Now he ignores outright defiance of multiple subpoenas by the Trump administration.

Now he pillories as “illegitimate” an inquiry that has already put many key players under oath, uncovering previously unknown and so far unrefuted facts about President Trump’s malfeasance and corruption.

Now he whines about secrecy despite the fact that 47 Republican committee members, totaling about a quarter of the caucus, are allowed to participate in the depositions in question.

Now he bobs, weaves and ducks to contend that a president pressuring a foreign power to trump up an investigation into a domestic political rival, quite likely by withholding congressionally mandated military aid, is a-okay.

Now he pretends his late, old honorable friend John McCain wouldn’t see right through his shameful abandonment of all principle in his pitiful metamorphosis into a partisan dead-ender.