MSNBC’s Morning Joe blasts Lindsey Graham for enabling Trump’s ‘illegal’ power grab: ‘He shouldn’t even be in Congress’

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough blasted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for morally bankrupting himself to serve President Donald Trump.

The "Morning Joe" host said Graham and the rest of the Republican Party had abdicated their constitutional responsibility by allowing Trump violate the law and gather undemocratic power.

"We're watching the political, ideological and moral collapse of my old Republican Party," Scarborough said. "Make no mistake, Donald Trump's amorality is driving this collapse, but his Republican allies on Capitol Hill and in powerful positions across America are too eager and too willing to be his accomplices."

He singled out his old friend Graham as a hypocrite.

"I've known Lindsey for years, we came in together in Congress in 1994, and Lindsey was always considered to be one of the most genial, reasonable and measured members of Congress," Scarborough said. "As a presidential candidate in 2016, he routinely warned us of the moral rot that the election of Donald Trump as the party's nominee would bring to the Republican Party, and he said that unhinged Manhattan developer would destroy the GOP if he were elected."

"Well, Lindsey was right then," he added, "but now he's one of the administration's leading henchman in hatching plots to run roughshod over our nation's traditions and turn the party into a rudderless collection of mini-me Donald Trumps."

Scarborough said the South Carolina Republican served as a check on former President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, but he said Graham had abandoned that responsibility under a Republican president.

"That same Lindsey Graham who actually followed John McCain's lead for so long is actually the Republican who is using his position as Senate chairman of the Judiciary Committee to encourage Donald Trump to declare a national emergency and illegally seize Article I powers if he doesn't get his way on the border wall," Scarborough said.

"Think about that for a second," he added, "and it is illegal, it will be overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States, and if Lindsey Graham doesn't know that, then he shouldn't even be in Congress."