U.S. Rep. Garret Graves is fighting for his political life in a redistricting battle, but it may be no great loss if he fails. He has turned out to be a major waste of potential.
When the Baton Rouge Republican ran for Congress in 2014, he had an impressive, bipartisan background as a congressional aide and as chair of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
At a campaign event late that year, though, he came across as an over-exuberant puppy, devoid of gravitas. Alas, he hasn’t matured much since then.
Several times this year, Graves has shown a penchant for treating lawmaking as a game of keeping personal political scores rather than as a serious undertaking with real-world consequences. He was at it again last week.
Speaker Mike Johnson, also of Louisiana, finally was planning to allow votes on aid to Ukraine, to Israel and to Taiwan, along with restrictions on the video service TikTok, but Graves said he didn’t approve of Johnson’s decision: “Look, the reality is, you have to keep in mind President Biden asked for Ukraine, President Biden asked for Israel, President Biden asked for aid for Taiwan, and President Biden supports the changes to TikTok. What are Republicans getting out of this?”
This is an embarrassingly juvenile way of looking at things. Why should it matter who “asked” for the aid? Is foreign aid a matter of keeping political score domestically, or is it about advancing U.S. interests abroad? Graves’ puerile scorekeeping is especially bizarre considering that, as noted at The Bulwark online publication, he is on record already supporting all four parts of Johnson’s plan. He has issued numerous statements for two years supporting the concept of aid for Ukraine; he already voted a month ago, along with 196 Republican colleagues, to force TikTok to be divested from its Chinese parent company; he already voted in favor of aid to Israel; and almost everybody in both parties in Congress supports aid to Taiwan.
Yet now Graves doesn’t want to give Biden a political win without something in return — even if it means merely voting for policies Graves himself already thinks are good ones.
This personal pettiness is not new for Graves, nor is a willingness to undermine fellow Louisiana Republicans. For no good reason, Graves last fall politically knifed Jefferson Parish’s Steve Scalise in the back when Scalise seemed on the verge of ascending to the House speakership. Graves was quite close to ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, who didn’t always see eye to eye with Scalise, but Scalise wasn’t a cause of McCarthy’s demise: Scalise argued against McCarthy’s ouster, not for it.
Once McCarthy fell, Scalise at the time seemed to offer the only possibility of stability in a bitterly divided House, as he is a solid conservative who nonetheless is respected enough by Democrats to keep chaos somewhat at bay. And with no sense at the time that back-bencher Johnson had a chance at the speakership, Scalise’s promotion seemed to offer Louisiana the only chance, an exceedingly rare one, at the House’s ultimate power post, along with a record of actually using his “pull” to benefit legitimate home-state interests.
Yet Graves was willing to throw all that away out of spite. As I was working independently to report (with several non-Louisiana sources already providing me the story), this newspaper’s Mark Ballard wrote a definitive account citing 19 separate sources. It outlined how Graves actively worked behind the scenes to undercut Scalise’s bid for Speaker and spread rumors that Scalise’s recovery from a form of cancer was dicey. He also made public comments dismissive of Scalise, and my sources say he did much more.
With behavior such as this, it is no wonder Graves has so many enemies even among fellow Republican officeholders in his home state.
If Graves is going to act so childishly, and if he is going to agitate, merely for partisan political advantage, against aid packages to allies facing existential threats, then he amply deserves a redistricting comeuppance. Good riddance.