Graham ally questions Republicans eyeing replacement bid: ‘Taking ridiculous positions’

Lindsey Graham had been dead for what, a few hours, before some of his colleagues started measuring the drapes. That's the part of this story that actually matters. Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman didn't wait for a funeral, didn't wait for a decent interval, didn't even wait for the man's family to process what happened. They started floating their own names. Timmons calling that "taking ridiculous positions" is putting it mildly.

There's a difference between ambition and indecency, and South Carolina Republicans just watched some of their own erase that line in real time. Wanting the seat isn't the problem. Everybody with a pulse and a primary strategy in that state has thought about it since the moment Graham's health became a talking point. But there's a way to want something and a way to grab for it, and grabbing while the body is still warm tells voters exactly how you'd behave with actual power.

Graham was a complicated figure, plenty of our readers had real disagreements with him over the years. That's fine, that's politics. What isn't fine is treating his death as a starting gun. South Carolina voters have long memories and they will remember who mourned and who maneuvered. Timmons seems to understand that the optics here aren't just bad, they're disqualifying for anyone hoping to inherit that seat with any credibility.

If Republicans want to hold this seat and hold it well, they need someone who can wait a week to say so out loud. That shouldn't be a controversial standard. The fact that it apparently is says something about where a few ambitious careers in Columbia are headed.