Why Lindsey Graham is going all-in on Biden SCOTUS pick

Lindsey Graham was at the garbage dump this weekend when he got some unsolicited input on his favored Supreme Court nominee: Judge Michelle Childs of the U.S. District Court for South Carolina.

“Three guys in pick-up trucks came up to me and said she ‘seems like a nice lady. I’m tired of this Harvard-Yale stuff.’ The great equalizer is the garbage dump because everybody’s got to throw out garbage,” Graham said in an interview Tuesday. “I was just struck by what they thought.”

The South Carolina senator has often seemed like President Joe Biden’s biggest antagonist over the past couple years, calling for investigations into his son and aligning himself at times with former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But at this moment, on the critical issue of the upcoming high-court vacancy, Graham might be Biden’s best Republican ally.

Graham is stumping hard for Childs, arguing her public state school education pairs well with Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman. He’s the most likely Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee to align with Democrats on a Supreme Court pick and send the nominee to the Senate floor with bipartisan support. And he’s condemning his party’s idea to try to block Biden’s nominee from moving forward by obstructing a committee vote: “I just don’t think it’s good for the process.”