Members Of The United States Senate

"Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and frequent critic of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime, posted a message on X in support of the widespread protests happening in the Mideast nation and assuring the protesters that President Donald Trump has “noticed” their resistance. “When President Trump says Make Iran Great Again, it means the protestors in Iran must prevail over the ayatollah,” Graham wrote, in part. “To all who are sacrificing in Iran, God bless. Help is on the way.” Anti-government protests have spread across Iran, marking the most significant challenge to the Ayatollah’s rule since the 2022 protests that kicked off following the death of Mahsa Amini. The newest wave of protests has unfolded over the past two weeks, with the Associated Press reporting the death toll has grown to at least 72 and over 2,300 others detained, citing the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. The Iranian government is attempting to crackdown on the demonstrations that started in response to a deteriorating economy and a currency that is plummeting in value as inflation spikes. Authorities initially sought dialogue with the protesters, seeking to avoid the images that marked the mass protests in 2019 and 2022, but ultimately the unrest continued to spread and violence at the hands of the security forces unfolded."

"If Syrian government forces continue to advance in the north toward Raqqa, I will push for reimposing Caesar Act sanctions on steroids. Apparently no one in Syria is listening to me or other U.S. government officials. If this continues, not only will there be bone-crushing sanctions, it will permanently damage relationships between the U.S. and the new Syrian government."

"The Prime Minister [i.e. Benjamin Netanyahu] convinced me that Israel is developing weapons that will change the future of warfare. They would love to partner with the United States, which is the most important form of aid we could ever give them and the most important event that would provide security to both countries."

"They just need weapons to free their country of a terrible invasion. They're sitting on a trillion dollars' worth of minerals that could be good to our economy. So I want to keep helping our friends in Ukraine. We can win this. They need our help."

"They're sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals in Ukraine. They could be the richest country in all of Europe. I don't want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China. If we help Ukraine now, they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of, that $10 to $12 trillion of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West, not given to Putin and China. This is a very big deal how Ukraine ends. Let's help them win a war we can't afford to lose. Let's find a solution to this war. But they're sitting on a gold mine. To give Putin $10 or $12 trillion for critical minerals that he will share with China is ridiculous."

"[Military assistance to Ukraine] The best money we’ve ever spent."

"Here’s an offer to my Russian ‘friends’ who want to arrest and try me for calling out the Putin regime as being war criminals: I will submit to jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court if you do."

"If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets."

"It is a sad day for the Supreme Court and a dangerous day for the Rule of Law. The radical assault on our institutions and the Constitution itself has reached a new level with the release of a draft opinion on a major issue facing the Court"

"I don’t want to reinforce that defiling the Capitol was okay. I don’t want to do anything that would make this more likely in the future. I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it."

"What are you doing? Take back the Senate! You've got guns. Use them. We give you guns for a reason, use them. Lethal force should have been used. How come you didn't protect us? It's doing your job."

"To young people out there, young people of color, young immigrants, this is a great state, but one thing I can say without any doubt, you can be an African American and go to the Senate but you just have to share our values. If you’re a young, African American or an immigrant, you can go anywhere in this state, you just need to be conservative, not liberal. Graham debating Jamie Harrison in Columbia, South Carolina"

"I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here. 'I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here': Graham predicts Trump impeachment will 'die quickly' in Senate, December 14, 2019"

"Finally, a president willing to take on this absurd policy of birthright citizenship. I’ve always supported comprehensive immigration reform – and at the same time – the elimination of birthright citizenship. In addition, I plan to introduce legislation along the same lines as the proposed executive order from President"

"Our government has a responsibility to defend our borders, but we must do so in a way that makes us safer and upholds all that is decent and exceptional about our nation."

"I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy [on the United States Supreme Court] occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say, “Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination,’” and you could use my words against me, and you’d be absolutely right."

"Embracing Donald Trump is embracing demographic death."

"If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it."

"If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you."

"It’s like [choosing between] being shot or poisoned."

"As a party, we are better to risk losing without Donald Trump than trying to win with him. Enough already with Mister Trump."

"I can't explain this. I don't know what would make a young man at 21 get so sick and twisted to kill nine people in a church; this is beyond my understanding... There are real people out there who are organized to kill people in religion and based on race. But it's 2015 there are people out there looking for Christians to kill them. So this is a mean time we live in."

"There are bad people in this world who are motivated by hate."

"We have never seen more threats against our nation and its citizens than we do today."

"I am running (for president) because I think the world is falling apart."

"And here's the first thing I would do if I were president of the United States. I wouldn't let Congress leave town until we fix this. I would literally use the military to keep them in if I had to. We're not leaving town until we restore these defense cuts. We are not leaving town until we restore the intel cuts."

"I want to talk very quickly about the world as we wish it to be. As we celebrate tonight, let's embrace in our hearts the world that we all wish it to be, a world where there's no rockets from Gaza, no Hezbollah attacks from the north, where Palestinian children go to school without being taught hate -- that's the world we wish it to be. An Iran controlled by its people, not some theocracy. An Iran governed by someone other than a Holocaust denier -- that's the world we wish it to be. An Iran pursuing peaceful nuclear power, not a nuclear weapon. A world where moderate Muslims are celebrated, not condemned and killed. An Afghanistan where a young girl never fears the soccer stadium, but can go to school and achieve her dreams. A free and independent Iraq where Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds can settle their differences at the ballot box and through the rule of law and be an inspiration to the Mideast. A UN, a United Nations that can actually control thugs and dictators. A United Nations that would never issue the Goldstone Report. That's the world as we wish it to be. This is the world as it is, and if you don't know the difference, then the world is a dangerous place. I know the difference between the world as we wish it to be and the world as it is. The world as it is, is a divided Palestinian people, a place that allows rockets to be launched from apartment buildings, a place for a mosques are weapon storage sites, a place where school children are taught hate -- that's the world as it is."

"I'm not a libertarian. If you are, you're welcome to vote for me and help this party, but we're not gonna build the party around libertarian ideas."

"Let's just get to the political heart of the matter, No matter what you want to call it, beyond border enforcement, a lot of people, particularly on our side, don't want to have a debate about this. Even if you debate it, you're wrong. Even if you're open-minded about compromise, you're wrong. It's a very simple answer to a complex problem. Send them all back. End of discussion, end of debate. Now that to me is not a realistic approach to a real problem."

"There is no room for injustice anywhere in the American mansion. But there is always room for understanding toward those who see the old ways crumbling. And to them, today, I simply say this: It must come. It is right that it should come. And when it has, you will find that a burden has been lifted from your shoulders, too."

"Congressional Quarterly 1965: Vol 21 Table of Contents, P.65-67 An assessment of Johnson's leadership ability during the 89th Congress, which passed a significant amount of liberal legislation."

"The record of the first session of the 89th Congress stood as a lesson in Presidential leadership surpassing even the strong showing made by Mr. Johnson in 1964, The President seized the momentum provided by his landslide victory in the 1964 election and the large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to get much of his program off to an early start; then he sustained the pace, sending up new messages and programs throughout the first half of the year to keep Congressional mills turning. Republican alternative programs got short shrift and even less public attention."

"As Democrats try to figure out what to do with President Trump, they might want to head over to the Arena Theater to get a good reminder of what happens when parties don’t take the right step to nurture their political strength. Policies are only as good or strong as the governing coalition that holds power. If a party hands control of power to the opposing party—as was the case with Obama and LBJ—the consequences could be devastating. Democrats are living through this nightmare for a second time with no end in sight."

"The political result of this turmoil is exactly what LBJ feared the most: the election of Republican Richard Nixon, who, though moderate by modern standards, sets into motion the conservative revolution that would greatly weaken the will to grow domestic policy and place Great Society programs under continual threat. Key portions of several programs, such as the Voting Rights Act, would not survive. Schenkkan reminds us that Richard Nixon was the Donald Trump of his times when, during an Oval Office meeting with LBJ, he promises to make America great again."

"Unlike Johnson, Trump has proved stubbornly indifferent to the responsibilities of governing. He shuns expertise, science, data or any of the other assets a typical president avails himself of. He has little in the way of achievement that he can point to. He thrives on division, where LBJ sought to make America a more inclusive place for people of color, the poor and the left behind. In this regard, the two men are night and day, both in how they’ve executed the job and the moral bearing they brought to it. But if Trump walks like Nixon and talks like Wallace, he looks a lot like Lyndon B. Johnson, a president who by 1968 seemed unable to put the country back together. If what today’s Middle Americans (or, in Nixon’s words, “forgotten Americans”) want is an end to the violence, drama and discord, this week’s unrest may ultimately benefit the one candidate who has built his brand on a basis of empathy, shared sacrifice and loss and a sunny belief in a better tomorrow. 2020 could be Joe Biden’s year."

"Nixon’s law-and-order message wasn’t just about urban riots. It was a repudiation of the governing party for its alleged part in the general unraveling of peace, prosperity and order. The late 1960s brought mounting inflation and racial unrest, campus uprisings, a sharp spike in crime, an emerging sexual revolution and court-mandated expansion of personal liberties—all set against the backdrop of a controversial war in Vietnam that the government seemed unable to win or exit. The incumbent president, Lyndon B. Johnson, and by extension, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, had presided over the very social unraveling that many voters were eager to reverse. This was Nixon’s opening—his appeal to swing voters, especially. Now, as in 1968, the violence of the past several days has revealed a broader pattern of social and political dissolution. Unemployment stands at 14.7 percent. Over 100,000 Americans lie dead of Covid, with no end in sight to the pandemic. Americans are bitterly divided by race, ethnicity and partisan affiliation. A foreign nation, Russia, has all but declared asymmetrical warfare against the United States. What the journalist Walter Lippmann said in 1968—“the world has never been more disorderly within memory of living man”—might credibly be said today. One key difference: Today, the candidate demanding “law and order” is the one who couldn’t preserve it. Like Johnson before him, Trump’s is the party in power—the party that has failed to provide peace, prosperity and social order. Republicans control the executive branch, the Senate and the Supreme Court. They alone own the chaos, rancor and instability that many voters have come to abhor and dread. Trump campaigns like Richard Nixon and George Wallace, but in reality, he is Lyndon B. Johnson: a man who has lost control of the machine."

"On 28 April 1965, 20,000 US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic on the orders of President Johnson to prevent the creation of “a second Cuba”."

"The key difference is that while Johnson may have been a rotten S.O.B., he knew what he was doing, more or less. He didn’t fumble into Vietnam in 1965 — he lied about his intentions in 1964. He was sufficiently intelligent, and sufficiently a man of the Senate, to understand that the particulars of legislative architecture were going to be the deciding factor in the success or the failure of his programs. He knew that they would have to be revisited over the years. He was a deeply weird man — and a monster — but he was also a resident of the real world. Barack Obama? Less so."

"Johnson ran as the peace candidate in 1964, promising to get us out of Vietnam or at least to stop any escalation of American involvement there. The opposite happened. Johnson promised that Medicare would be efficiently run and financially self-sustaining. The opposite happened. Johnson said that his Great Society programs would usher in a new kind of America, one in which government-directed investments in anti-poverty campaigns and educational projects would not only lift up the poor but would, by helping them to maximize their own economic value, lift the entire country, too. The opposite, or something close to it, happened there, too. Johnson, who in Congress had opposed not only a great deal of civil-rights legislation but even anti-lynching bills, would in 1964 reinvent himself as a civil-rights champion. It is pleasant to think that, in whatever afterlife he finds himself in, he is both amused and pleased to see himself politically reincarnated as a black man."

"Lyndon Johnson had fallen into popular disfavor by the time Nixon succeeded him in the White House; but in succeeding Kennedy, winning a landslide over Goldwater, and pushing through Congress not only Kennedy's remaining initiatives but his own Great Society program, Johnson had been by late 1965 perhaps literally more powerful than any of his predecessors. The Tonkin Gulf resolution he maneuvered through Congress left him and for a while Nixon virtually a free hand in Indochina; and in waging one of the biggest wars in American history without Congressional declaration, Johnson notably expanded the already extensive "war powers" of the presidency."

"Johnson’s reasons for not running in 1968 were principally rooted to his health. He had suffered a nearly fatal heart attack in 1955, at age 46, and was acutely aware that his father and paternal grandfather had both died of heart attacks at age 62. (As it stood, Johnson died of a heart attack at 64, four years and two days after leaving the presidency). He was also conscious of the crises the country had endured when Roosevelt died unexpectedly of a stroke in 1945 and when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke in 1919 that had left him largely incapacitated. Of course, there was also the issue of the Vietnam War, which dogged Johnson’s presidency and polarized the country as he steadily escalated U.S. involvement. Johnson saw not running for re-election as an overture to the North Vietnamese to agree to peace talks, which until then, had eluded him. And surely he knew that his campaign for re-election would further divide America. As Lady Bird Johnson said of his decision, “I saluted him for being clearheaded enough to see that he wasn’t the man at that particular time who could unite the country.” It’s different for Biden who is in good health and can’t be expected to unite an America whose divisions are largely intractable. But he, as much as anyone, can ensure that America remains sound and true to our most basic ideals during a pivotal time. Johnson chose not to run in 1968 “with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day.” Biden should run for re-election for the same reasons."

"Our 36th and 46th presidents share a number of key things in common. Lyndon Johnson and Joe Biden both got elected to Congress before the age of 30, achieved great prominence in the Senate, and became vice presidents to charismatic, younger leaders who represented generational change. They also rose to become president, promulgating ambitious domestic agendas and leading a divided nation through turbulent times. Johnson and Biden might also share something else in common; there has been wide speculation that Biden might step down from the presidency after a single term, becoming the first incumbent president to opt not to run for re-election since Johnson announced that he would not be a candidate 55 years ago today."

"Johnson, who is unable to put his own house in order - give reality to democracy in America and give black people their basic rights as American citizens - sees this unjust, unnecessary genocide as an affair of honour."

"Johnson was a candidate characterized as moderate who defeated an extreme Republican and thereby created a large scale governing mandate to pass popular, large scale structural changes to redress inequality and racism. There are lessons here for today’s liberals. It is to concentrate on and work toward the margin victory. A moderate president with strong margins in the House and Senate can achieve many more liberal goals than a liberal without the Senate. We live in a time of extreme polarization, so a Johnson-like landslide may not be possible. But if there’s an event that can scramble that kind of polarization, it is a global pandemic that an incumbent president badly mismanages."

"He was a vice president of a charismatic president adored by liberals. He had a long record in the Senate, with a history of savvy deal-making that was seen as an asset to a less experienced younger president, a newcomer to Washington. And as he ran for the presidency in his own right, he was distrusted by a left newly ascendant in their party. That distrust was born of a record on race that seemed anachronistic to a younger generation. That description of Lyndon Johnson could easily be used for Joe Biden. And in that symmetry is a lesson for liberals. Because as president, Johnson would have the most effective progressive record on race and class of any Democratic president in the past 80 years. The foundational principles of modern liberalism — civil rights and greater economic equality — took further strides during Johnson’s presidency than any since the New Deal."

"As one of our interviewers... says... once you kill a sitting president in high noon in Dealey Plaza and blow his head off, you're not going to go back to normal... After Kennedy was killed, and nobody asked... what was Kennedy's real policy on Vietnam? Well... he was going to pull out of Vietnam. He was very clear about it, and that's what people get confused. Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, who took over the office went right to war quickly. He went to a far more aggressive posture of Vietnam, which resulted in more-- It was a lie, another lie, and that war was a disaster... Unfortunately, the same forces that made that war happen continued in our life, and they controlled us and pushed us into another war and another war and another war... we propagandize an enemy, make him far bigger than he is, and I don't know what we're fighting."

"Johnson was a man of his time, and bore those flaws as surely as he sought to lead the country past them. For two decades in Congress he was a reliable member of the Southern bloc, helping to stonewall civil rights legislation."

"It was LBJ who pushed through the civil rights bills in 1957, 1964 and 1965 that finally gave African Americans the same rights (at least on paper) as white America. On the other hand, there can be no question that Johnson was a racist who looked down on people of color as inferior."

"Kennedy promised. Johnson delivered."

"[Former President] Lyndon Johnson in many respects was a very, very good president. Domestically he brought forth some major pieces of legislation. He chose not to run in ’68 because of opposition to his views on Vietnam, and I worry very much that President Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated, not just young people, but a lot of the Democratic base, in terms of his views on Israel and this war."