Vice President JD Vance joined his former congressional colleagues to remember the life and legacy of the late North Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham during a memorial service at the Capitol.
Vance, who offered his condolences to Graham’s family and staff, recalled the late senator’s “world-class sense of humor,” which he said once left him with “abdominal cramps,” and interest in “people from all walks of life.”
“This was a guy who couldn’t have stood more than 6-foot-6 or 5-foot-7, but he’d swashbuckle in with his jacket open like he was 6-foot-5,” Vance told the crowd gathered in the Capitol Rotunda. “He had an attitude to him, and it’s one of the reasons why Lindsey Graham was Lindsey Graham.”
The vice president added, “That swashbuckling, infectious laugh, that attitude, that passion that so many others have talked about. Lindsey Graham was impossible not to like as a human being, and, of course, as a United States senator.”
Vance reflected on how he came to know Graham during his first campaign to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate in 2022 before becoming better acquainted in the chamber, where, on at least one occasion, they clashed over U.S. funding for the war in Ukraine.
“I remember going back to my staff and saying, ‘Well, that’s probably the end of Lindsey’s vote on the railway bill because he is never going to support anything I support after the argument that he and I just had,” he said. “I found out a couple of weeks later from another Senate colleague that the fiercest advocate of that bill behind the scenes was Sen. Lindsey Graham. I said, ‘Why are you helping me?’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t care about it, but you do.’”
“And that was the kind of colleague he could be: a person you argued with and fought with in one minute, but behind the scenes, without collecting an ounce of credit, was working for you and working for the things that you cared about in the next,” Vance added.
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Also crediting Graham with securing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation amid the Trump-nominated pick’s disputed controversies, Vance concluded by saying he would remember Graham as a person who “loved people,” and because of that, “was willing to reason with them, to respect them, and, ultimately, to persuade them.”
“May God comfort all of those who loved Lindsey Graham, particularly his beautiful family, and may God rest the soul of Sen. Lindsey Graham, a true American original,” he said.