In the days leading up to Donald Trump’s second presidency, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham got some unexpected news.
Graham was one of the longest-serving members of the Senate Committee on the Budget, and, based on seniority, would be its chairman for the 119th Congress — a job poised to place him at the center of some of the biggest policy fights of the next six months. He’d not only be responsible for ushering the big beautiful bill across the Senate floor, a herculean task given Republicans’ three-seat majority. But he’d also be leading a rag-tag group of opinionated Republicans who sat on the panel, many of them fiscal hawks.
The late Graham, speaking to the Washington Examiner a week before his sudden death on July 11, fondly referred to that crew as “Murderer’s Row.”
“I think God works in mysterious ways,” he said. “Making me budget chairman for the One Big Beautiful Bill had to be divine providence, because nobody else would have thought of doing that, including me.”
It was not that Graham wasn’t up for the challenge. By the time the bill passed in July of last year, his fingerprints were over virtually every step of the process, from the debate over one bill versus two to the controversial decision to make its tax cuts permanent.
But Graham also understood that, as chairman, he’d be leading some of the most vocal Republicans in his conference, several of whom were a thorn in leadership’s side over the law’s impact on the deficit. He also never fathomed that his membership on the committee would catapult him to such a pivotal role.
“You know, I’ve been on the budget committee for 10 years, and we’ve done some things of consequence, but mostly not,” Graham said. “Mostly you don’t do a whole lot.”
He added: “Let’s put it this way: Being on the budget committee wasn’t the reason I woke up every morning, but I got to be chairman.”
The circumstance was so unusual, in part, because Republicans had unified control of government for only the fifth time in the last 100 years, giving them a rare window of opportunity to pass legacy-setting legislation without the help of Democrats.
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And though the process involved more than a dozen committees, it was Graham’s that had to navigate the intricacies of reconciliation, the filibuster-skirting budget process that meant endless consultations with the Senate parliamentarian, and taking point on “vote-a-ramas” that gave Democrats repeated chances to sink the bill.
Republicans passed that piece of legislation on July 1, 2025, after one final voting marathon that lasted more than 24 hours and required Graham and his Republican colleagues to beat back over 40 amendments.
‘Keep it simple’
The formula for success, Graham said, was rather straightforward. When Democrats vote “no,” Republicans vote “yes” — a shirts and skins exercise he referred to as “Budget Committee 101.”
He hammered that message home from the very first meeting he had with committee Republicans in early 2025, reminding his colleagues that they were on the “front lines” of the reconciliation process and that failure was not an option.
The pep talk was directed at Republicans on his committee, who he feared would let the perfect be the enemy of the good. He warned that the emphasis on deficit reduction would have to be set aside at a certain point for the broader goal of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
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“We have a lot of smart people with stronger opinions, and I think my biggest contribution was to try to keep it simple,” Graham said. “If we fail, then people are going to look at us as the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, and a group of Republicans who missed a historic opportunity to make the economy stronger and better, to avoid higher taxes, and implement new policy, good policy — without one Democratic vote.”
From the outset, he encouraged his colleagues to make their mark on the bill, including by offsetting its price tag. That is, so long as it did not jeopardize final passage.
“Here’s what I said: I’ll take any good idea you have, but there’s two things you got to meet,” Graham told the Washington Examiner.
“No. 1, it’s got to be Byrd-compliant,” he said, referring to the rules of budget reconciliation. “And two, it can’t scare four people to death who will jump out the window and vote no.”
Graham’s listening tour
Keeping it simple was easier said than done. Graham wanted to start Trump’s presidency by funding his immigration crackdown, a relatively uncontroversial lift for Republicans that would have punted the thorny question of how to pay for his tax cuts until later in the year.
But the House, which pressed for a single, all-encompassing bill, got the final word on that process, meaning Graham spent the spring working with leadership to wrangle the holdouts on his committee.
He had already navigated a vote-a-rama to pass a border-only reconciliation bill and would now have to do so again for a much larger package, this time with stiffer resistance. And the promise of $2 trillion in savings coming from the House was not enough to placate some of his members.
Of the 11 Republicans on Graham’s panel, three were outspoken fiscal conservatives: Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Mike Lee (R-UT).
The remainder were a mix of senior hands, including Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Senate Committee on Finance Chairman Mike Crapo (R-ID), as well as more junior members who were comfortable toeing the party line.
Graham said it took being a good listener to overcome the opposition.
“Our people love to talk about this stuff,” Graham said. “These people love talking about the budget. And I said, ‘Your ships come in with me. We’ll talk to anybody and everybody.’ We’ll go to the pope, talk to him, if we need to.”
Graham did not spearhead all of the meetings that eventually won over the fiscal hawks, a blitz that included sitdowns with Vice President JD Vance and other senior administration officials.
Graham did, however, arrange a fateful meeting in the Oval Office in April 2025, inviting Republicans on the budget committee to speak to the president just before the Senate voted on a blueprint that marked the first major step in the reconciliation process.
It wasn’t an audience with the pope, but putting fiscal hawks in front of the undisputed head of their party had a way of making them more comfortable with the bill’s deficit impact, and they voted later that week to move ahead with the process.
Graham, a close Trump ally, said that he encouraged the president to have the same listening ear ahead of the meeting.
“I said, ‘Listen, pal, you’re about to get an earful here, be patient, all these people are really smart, we’ll get there.’”
“They have some good ideas — be open to them,” he added.
The fiscal hawks left with a commitment, suggested by chief of staff Susie Wiles and blared out by Trump on social media, that the White House was committed to “right-sizing” the budget as part of reconciliation.
‘A debate without drama’
Through it all, Graham treated his job of fiscal hawk whisperer with zeal. He did not consider himself a debt crusader, making the fact that he was their de facto leader on the budget committee an awkward fit.
But Graham was serious about not letting their qualms derail everything he valued most about the package. He was one of the most vocal advocates for the billions the White House wanted to plow into border security and saw its Pentagon funding as an even bigger prize.
As budget chairman, he also took the dramatic step of sidestepping the parliamentarian on whether the tax cuts could be made permanent, a deficit-busting move that became the Senate’s biggest contribution to the One Big Beautiful Bill.
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“I don’t lie awake at night wondering whether or not cutting taxes is good for the economy. I think it is, within reason,” Graham said. “So, that was a debate without drama for me.”
Graham’s cajoling was not limited to the Senate. He raised eyebrows at the outset of the process when he took the unusual step of huddling with members of the fiscally conservative Freedom Caucus in the House, partially because he had a natural ally in them. At the time, they wanted to split the One Big Beautiful Bill into two, just as he did.
Graham also said he wanted to get ahead of the typical House-versus-Senate tensions he expected to develop, given that Republicans had even tighter margins in the lower chamber.
“I made a decision for the Senate to be like a partner, not a problem,” Graham said.
Binary choice
Fiscal hawks’ insistence on deep budget cuts could, at times, test Graham’s patience. The April vote on the budget blueprint was far from the end of the road for Republicans, and it took another three months to get everyone on board with the final bill.
Graham chuckled as he recalled how fixated Johnson was on charts, figures, and back-of-the-napkin math that showed the bill’s impact on the debt.
At one point, Graham grabbed a piece of paper and made his own chart, scribbling “yes” and “no” on it to underline the either-or choice facing Republicans in a future floor vote.
“I’m sitting there looking at these charts. I said, ‘That’s great. Tell me what you’d like to do different, we’ll see if we can do it,’” Graham said. “But we’ve eventually got to vote yes.”
Outside of fiscal conservatism, the group of Republicans on his committee was also simply opinionated, and Graham cryptically handed office supplies to anyone who spoke up at their first meeting as a way of teasing them about it.
“You know, we need to have a message, we need to tell people what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it,” he recounted Scott as saying.
The advice was met with Graham handing him a pen and retorting, “You’re in charge of messaging.”
When Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) urged his colleagues to have a plan for how to engage the parliamentarian — “we need great lawyers and great minds” — Graham pushed a notepad in his direction.
“You’re in charge of getting things through the Byrd problem,” Graham responded, adding a moniker to his assignment for emphasis.
“You’re the Byrd man,” Graham told Kennedy.
Graham laughed as he remembered Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) was next up to speak.
“And I said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ He goes, ‘I’m good, I don’t have any concerns at all,’ because he realized if he expressed a thought or an idea, he was in charge of it.”
All hands on deck
It was with that levity that Graham recalled the six months it took to convince the fiscal hawks on his committee to vote “yes,” describing the entire process as a “wild ride” but “fun.”
The trio was still noncommittal on the eve of the final vote and only relented after leadership unsuccessfully tried to win support for an amendment, sponsored by Scott, to further pare back Medicaid.
But Graham said the Budget Committee still functioned as a “team” regardless of the deficit impasse and found common cause in attempting to convince the rest of their conference to reject the dozens of Democratic amendments during the vote-a-rama.
“I asked them for their help,” Graham said. “You know, ‘I can’t get on the floor and sell all this by myself — or Crapo. Y’all are talented. Help me,’ and they did.”
Lee, in particular, was a persuasive voice, Graham added, given his reputation among conservatives as a floor tactician and policy wonk.
“When Mike Lee spoke on stuff like this, people listened,” Graham said. “I mean, when you look at the cast of characters on that committee, there’s some talented, smart people, very opinionated people, and we did it.”
Big-footing Paul
There was one fiscal hawk Graham could not wrangle by the end of the process: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who does not sit on the budget committee.
Paul was a “no” on the One Big Beautiful Bill because it included a $5 trillion hike in the federal debt limit and was unwilling to budge despite the headache it created for Republicans. His resistance is part of what forced leadership to broker a complicated deal with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a centrist, that came together after hours of late-night bartering.
The final vote was a nail-biter and only cleared with a tiebreaker from Vance.
Lately, Paul has been friendlier to leadership and the White House, helping Republicans pass a second reconciliation bill, also focused on border security, through the Senate in June as chairman of its Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
But he notoriously butted heads with Graham last year over the bill, releasing a budget blueprint that only provided half of the money the White House had requested for immigration enforcement. Graham and Paul, who usually were on opposite sides on fiscal matters and foreign policy, both ran for president against Trump in 2016.
Graham responded by outflanking Paul, releasing a competing blueprint that doled out the full $150 billion for border wall construction, detention beds, and a surge of new immigration officers.
“Listen, I like Rand,” Graham said of the spat. “You know, he’s worried about how much money you need to secure the border. Well, quite frankly, I thought the administration’s request was reasonable, was needed, and I honored it.”
After six vote-a-ramas as budget chairman, Graham jested over how much he enjoyed the process.
“I love reconciliation. I want it to never end,” Graham said.
Members of the Washington Examiner’s staff who have worked on this series over the past several months are Haris Alic, Hailey Bullis, Bob Cusack, Christian Datoc, James A. Downs, Gabrielle M. Etzel, Lauren Green, Zach Halaschak, Chris Irvine, Joseph Lawler, Naomi Lim, Maydeen Merino, Callie Patteson, Mabinty Quarshie, Samantha-Jo Roth, David Sivak, and Ramsey Touchberry.