She was sworn in by Sen. Charles Grassley, who is about to turn 93 and whose grandson, the speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives, is a good bet to succeed him eventually. She took her brother’s seat in the chamber, will likely serve on the same committees as her brother and will certainly vote the same way as her brother.
Tinged by tragedy and tempered to assure her brother’s legacy, Darline Graham Nordone is the newest member of the Senate, propelled there by the sudden death of Lindsey Graham and by the near unanimous surge of support from Donald Trump and much of the South Carolina Republican establishment — an establishment that, in a contradiction of the term, is determined to undermine the political establishment.
Darline Graham — the name she will use in the Senate — is no radical, more a grieving sibling than a crusading pugilist, more an advocate for the blind than a blind zealot for a political cause. If anything, her cause has been her brother’s career. Now she is poised to serve until a replacement is selected.
“Lindsey was there for her after their parents died,” former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who joined the chamber herself after defeating an appointed senator, Bob Kreuger, in 1993, said in an interview. “Now she will be there in the Senate for him.”
Graham is one of 15 appointed current senators; 11 of them later were elected on their own. She’s not going to pursue that track. Nonetheless, she is part of a Senate tradition, not only of those chosen rather than elected to the office, but also of those who follow family members they grieve to seats of their own on Capitol Hill.
In that regard, she is more likely to follow the path of Paul G. Kirk Jr. of Massachusetts, who was appointed to the Senate to succeed Edward M. Kennedy in 2009, than Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who succeeded her husband in the House of Representatives in 1940.
As Rep. Clyde Smith lay dying, he issued a statement that, word for word with the exception of the pronoun, could have applied to Kennedy’s view of Kirk as the senator approached his demise: “I know of no one else who has the full knowledge of my ideas and plans or is as well qualified as she is, to carry on these ideas or my unfinished work,” Smith said. That’s the implicit remit that the new Sen. Graham carries.
Margaret Chase Smith was elected to succeed her husband in the House, then later served 24 years in the Senate, the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress. Kirk served in the Senate until a successor, the Republican Scott Brown, was elected. In both cases — here is a phrase that seldom is heard in today’s culture — duty called.
“(Graham will) be there to honor the things that, were he still living, he would have an interest in,” Kirk said. He knows this firsthand.
As Kennedy’s decline due to a malignant brain tumor accelerated, his family took stock of the situation. The senator’s lifelong dream was a national health system, and the Affordable Care Act, now known as Obamacare or the ACA, required 60 votes, Kennedy’s among them. The race was on to avoid the real possibility that the bill would die with Kennedy. The first hurdle was changing Massachusetts law to permit the governor, in this case the Democrat Deval Patrick, to choose a successor. Kennedy’s wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, and his sons, Edward M. Kennedy Jr. and former Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, had a strong preference for Kirk, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee who had long been a top Kennedy aide.
“Paul will not seek the open seat in the special election coming up in January,” said Patrick Kennedy. “But for the next few months, he will carry on the work and the focus of Sen. Kennedy, mindful of his mission, and his values, and his love of Massachusetts.”
Kirk understood this. “Everything I did was to try to be consistent with what Sen. Kennedy wanted,” he said. “The most important thing I had to do in my time in the Senate was assuring his legacy.”
Indeed, he broke with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who fought for a single-payer system that Kirk personally preferred, because of fears that it would jeopardize prospects for a healthcare program at all. “I told him I learned from Sen. Kennedy not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. I told him I’d love to be with him, but we needed to get the ACA.”
The new senator from South Carolina almost certainly will honor her brother in a similar way.
“Lindsey was her anchor, and in a big way he raised her,” said Kirk. “There is a family bond there that’s enormously important, and she’ll do the best she can in a short time to honor that. That would be true to her constituency and to her brother.”
Kirk made a difference in sealing approval of Obamacare. Darline Graham may do the same when it comes to assuring continued American aid to Ukraine and support for Israel, two of Lindsey Graham’s priorities, both under siege today.
When Margaret Chase Smith entered the House, there were no hints of the huge role she would play a decade later, shortly after she was elected to the Senate. It came just after Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin made his notorious Wheeling, West Virginia, speech alleging the State Department was “infested” with scores of Communists.
In her “Declaration of Conscience,” Sen. Smith said, in remarks that are relevant today: “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism — the right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of independent thought.”
Former Sen. Hutchison included Sen. Smith in her 2004 “American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country,” in large measure because of the obstacles the woman from Maine had to surpass.
“She made her mark, but it was hard,” Ms. Hutchison reflected the other day. “She had early setbacks. She wasn’t taken seriously in the beginning. Because of heavy biases against women, she wasn’t included in the ‘club’ that was the Senate. But she was a trailblazer.”
As Sen. Smith illustrated, those who follow departed loved ones can also lead.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.