Ted Cruz Remembers His Dear Friend Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham built his whole career on being unafraid to work a room, and it turns out that included the room full of people who disagreed with him. When word came Sunday that he'd died after falling ill, the tributes didn't split along party lines the way almost everything else in Washington does. Ted Cruz, who didn't always see eye to eye with Graham on tactics, took the time to call him a dear friend. That's not nothing in a town where "friend" usually means "someone I haven't attacked publicly this week."

Graham was an easy man to caricature and plenty of people on both sides did it. To some conservatives he was too quick to cut deals, too cozy with McCain-era foreign policy instincts that didn't age well with the base. To Democrats he was a hypocrite who flipped depending on which administration was in the White House. Both of those criticisms had truth in them at different points. But the man also spent decades actually showing up, sitting across the table, arguing his case in person instead of just posting about it, which is more than most members of Congress can say now.

There's something worth noticing in how many people from both parties stopped what they were doing to say something real about him. It doesn't erase the policy fights or pretend he was always right. It just tells you that personal decency and political disagreement used to be able to coexist in the same building. Whatever you thought of Lindsey Graham's votes, that's a habit of governing worth remembering, and worth trying to get back.