Thune chokes up on Senate floor speaking about Graham

John Thune isn't a man given to public displays of emotion. That's precisely why watching him choke up on the Senate floor Monday hit as hard as it did. This wasn't a staged moment for the cameras. It was a colleague, a friend, trying and failing to get through a few sentences about a man he'd worked beside for years, who was alive and cracking jokes on the Senate floor days earlier and is now gone from an aortic dissection nobody saw coming.

Lindsey Graham was a lot of things to a lot of people, and plenty of Republicans spent years arguing with him over judgment calls, foreign policy, whatever the fight of the month happened to be. But say what you want about the man's politics, he showed up. He worked the room, he made calls nobody else wanted to make, and by every account from people who actually served with him, he made the job easier for the people around him even when he made it harder for himself.

There's something worth sitting with in the fact that it takes a death to get Washington to admit, out loud, that these are actual human relationships and not just partisan chess pieces. Thune didn't reach for talking points. He reached for the truth, which is that losing a friend at work is still losing a friend, whether you're a senator or anyone else.

Graham's seat will get filled and the Senate will grind on, as it always does. But that moment on the floor was a reminder that underneath all the noise, there are still people in that building who actually like each other, who lean on each other, and who feel it when one of their own is suddenly not there anymore.