Morning Joe: McConnell And Graham Could Be Worried About Primary Challenges

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough thinks senior Republicans could be worried about primary challengers in the 2020 Senate elections. Scarborough and guests tried to explain why Senator Lindsey Graham and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appear to be abandoning their principles to support President Donald Trump’s push for a border wall.

Scarborough showed a clip of Graham talking to a reporter about Trump’s state of emergency. The journalist asked Graham about diverting money from the construction of schools in order to pay for a border wall. She was referring to the military construction budget, which is spent on a variety of projects, including infrastructure for military families.

“You know, Lindsey Graham, actually, over the past month, past two months, he’s shown his worst traits,” Scarboroug said. “He is constantly on board, whether it’s intellectual, he can go from being a conservatives’ conservative to a moderate  to a moderate liberal. He’s all over the place. He’s a John McCain maverick, he calls Donald Trump during the campaign, he said he’s mentally unbalanced, he says that Republicans will destroy themselves if they elect Donald Trump and they will deserve to be destroyed.”

“He stands by John McCain, John McCain passes, and then he stands with a man who mocks and ridicules John McCain and still mocks and ridicules John McCain,” Scarborough said. “I would ask ‘Who is this Lindsey Graham?’ but unfortunately it’s the same Lindsey Graham who’s been flipping and flopping like a mullet in the interstate mullet toss Floribama for years now.”

“He just flips and flops and flips and flops. And, Sam Stein, to declare a national emergency as Lindsey Graham just did or to say — we’ve got a national emergency, when I will say again, what we say every day, Donald Trump’s three arguments are just specious. No national emergency because we have the lowest number of illegal crossings in half a century. In 50 years. Since Lindsey Graham was in grade school, right?”

“But I think the bigger story that we’re sort of getting at here is just the acquiescence of Republicans in Congress,” guest Sam Stein said. “Not just Lindsey Graham , which we’ve touched upon here, but Mitch McConnell, who has proclaimed himself to be an institutionalist, was the one who announced this deal and announced his support for an emergency declaration.”

“What Congress is essentially doing here, at least what Republicans in Congress are doing here, they’re saying the appropriations process that we hold so dear, which gives us so much power as a co-equal branch of government, we are going to cede at least a portion of that to the government. They are essentially just taking away their own authorities and for no other reason other than they’re scared the President might hurt them in a primary challenge.”

“[Y]ou have Republicans that are concerned about Donald Trump and the primary,” Scarborough said. “Of course, they should look back to see what happened in November of 2018, to see how that worked out for them: the worst loss in terms of lost seats since 1974. The worst popular vote loss in the history of this republic. And I’m just curious, Lindsey Graham’s feeling awful good about that border wall, a fake emergency, saying that kids in Mitch McConnell’s state don’t need money for schools, that they should use this money on a phony wall, that Mitch McConnell when he was in charge for two years, along with Paul Ryan, didn’t spend a dime on because they knew it was a stupid idea.”

“I understand Mitch may be scared of being primaried by [Kentucky Governor] Matt Bevin or somebody else,” Scarborough said. “I wonder how general election voters in the state of Kentucky are going to feel about Mitch McConnell taking money away, as Lindsey Graham said, Mitch McConnell taking money away from schools in Kentucky for this imaginary, phony wall he could have funded himself when he and Paul Ryan were in power for two years.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.