Sen. Lindsey Graham dead at 71 after 'brief and sudden' illness, office says

Lindsey Graham was never a man you could predict, and that's exactly why South Carolina kept sending him back for 23 years. He could infuriate his own party one week and be the most reliable ally the White House had the next. News of his death at 71, after what his office called a brief and sudden illness, lands as a genuine shock. Politicians die in office rarely enough that it still stops a room.

Whatever you thought of his votes, and plenty of conservatives spent years arguing with themselves over exactly that, Graham was a workhorse in a chamber full of showhorses. He showed up on Armed Services, he showed up on Judiciary, he showed up for John McCain when almost nobody else would, and later he showed up hard for Trump when it counted. That kind of loyalty, to people and to institutions, is rarer in Washington than anyone in that town wants to admit.

He was also just good at the job in a way that's going out of style. Graham understood the Senate as a place where you actually had to talk to people you disagreed with to get anything done, and he did that constantly, sometimes to the frustration of his own base. You don't have to agree with every deal he cut to recognize that skill is disappearing fast.

South Carolina lost a fighter tonight, and the Senate lost one of the last members who remembered how to legislate instead of just perform. That's worth saying plainly, without the usual partisan hedging that death notices in this town too often get.