US Senator Lindsey Graham dies at 71
US Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has died at 71 after what his office described as a brief and sudden illness. He was first elected to the Senate in 2002 and won re-election three times, most recently in 2020, after eight years in the House.
Graham chaired the Senate Budget Committee and sat on the Appropriations and Judiciary committees, making him a central figure in both spending fights and judicial confirmations. He was among the chamber’s most vocal foreign-policy hawks — a longtime advocate of military action against Iran and one of Israel’s staunchest allies in Congress. An early Trump critic in 2016, he later became one of the president’s closest congressional allies.
His death leaves a vacancy in a closely divided Senate; under South Carolina law the governor appoints an interim successor pending a special election, and the seat’s Republican hold is not in doubt. The timing is notable: Graham had been a leading proponent of the pressure campaign against Tehran as the US and Iran trade strikes across the Gulf.