What an interesting — and honoring — thing it is to die a politician after many years, only for everyone to learn afterwards that you were never corrupt.
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Which is the picture we have here with the now-late Sen, Lindsey Graham, who served in public office for 23 years.
🇺🇸 Lindsey Graham spent 31 years at the center of American power and left behind a net worth of just under $1.5 million.
That put him 294th of 535 members of Congress, closer to the bottom half than the top.
For contrast, the Senate’s richest member, James Justice, is worth an… pic.twitter.com/xwzzQwrmdX
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) July 13, 2026
Graham, in fact, died one of the poorer members of Congress, never using his office to get rich, the way so many of them do: Sen. Mark Warner, and Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Ro Khanna spring to mind, but there are so many others, even on the conservative side.
No doubt they knew all the loopholes, all the ways to get rich in public office without getting arrested, the weak laws and weaker enforcement being the probolem.
But Graham never availed himself of those things, based on what’s known about him, he was a hard-working senator solely focused on being a senator, serving the people of South Carolina, and the nation itself.
No insider trading, those magically timed trades based on privileged information, which is hard to prove, but how a lot of them get rich while in public office, both in Congress and across the executive agencies.
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No sleazy book deals — huge amounts of cash paid from publishers, who get it from most anywhere, to deliver cash to the waiting pol, in exchange for … something. A lot of them get rich that way, too.
No NGO wrap-arounds into campaign coffers, to be paid in inflated salaries to family members, keeping the wealth all in the family, in exchange for … something.
No weird real estate deals, the buying of properties at cut-rate prices and unloading them at inflated prices, the way a lot of them do, looking at you, California politicians.
No strange money appearing … out of nowhere. We even see that and think: suitcases of cash from somewhere, in exchange for … something.
Graham was an experienced pol and had to have known all the tricks. But with only $1.4 million to his name at the time of his death, an amount that could have easily come from equity on his modest home, he obviously never partook.
That is laudatory. And for all our differences with him on a few things here and there, he obviously was a senator of principle. Nobody paid him off. He was no sleazeball. And that is worth honoring.
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Image: Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed