Oops: Lindsey Graham didn’t have the ranking member’s approval when he asked Susan Rice to testify

| 6:18 pm EDT May 3, 2017
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Senator Lindsey Graham seems to be trying to use the subcommittee he chairs to placate both sides of the political divide. He’s racing to give Donald Trump’s nemesis Sally Yates a chance to testify before any of the full committees get around to her. He’s also trying to get Susan Rice to testify, in a seeming nod to Trump’s crazy conspiracy theory that Rice was meddling in the election. But as it turns out, Graham has overreached in a manner which may have backfired in the perception department.

Graham didn’t bother to get the approval of his subcommittee’s Democratic ranking member Senator Sheldon Whitehouse before inviting Susan Rice to testify, says the Daily Beast (link), as is customary for these matters. This has allowed Rice to look reasonable when she turned down the request today.

Susan Rice is surely politically savvy enough to observe that Senator Graham is merely looking to haul her in front of the cameras and ask her ominous sounding questions about how she was keeping tabs on Michael Flynn, in order to pander to Trump’s base. Nevermind of course that she was the National Security Adviser at the time and it was her job to keep an eye on the actions of someone like Flynn, who at that point was suspected of being an agent or asset of Russia. And so while Rice may yet end up testifying if Whitehouse signs off on it, she’s already managed to frame any such appearance as mere partisan politicking on Graham’s part. And if he tries to subpoena her to testify, she has a built in argument with which to approach any judge.

There are those in politics who believe congressional subcommittees exist simply so those who aren’t the chair or ranking member of a full committee can instead be the chair or ranking member of a subcommittee, thus allowing them to sound more influential than they are. In this sense it seems that Lindsey Graham, in his role as a subcommittee chair, has been caught overreaching in an overtly partisan manner in the name of trying to look arbitrarily bipartisan. Help fund Palmer Report