Darline Graham has spent nearly 30 years in public service — running the South Carolina Commission for the Blind since 2019, working with Clemson University, the state Department of Employment and Workforce, and the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation. On Tuesday, she was sworn in as South Carolina's first female United States senator, appointed by Governor Henry McMaster to finish her late brother Lindsey Graham's term after he passed away Saturday at the age of 71.
The women of The View took one look at that historic moment and called it "the very definition of DEI."
That was Joy Behar's precise phrase on Wednesday's episode. Her co-host Sunny Hostin piled on immediately: "Correct, correct. It's everything that the Republican Party stands against. Everything! It's DEI. Nepotism. All these things thrown in together." Hostin then questioned whether Graham was qualified to hold the seat at all. "While she is a certified optician and while she has done great work in that field, I don't think that she should be representing the people of South Carolina in the U.S. Senate. I just don't."
Behar helpfully clarified the intellectual standard at play: "It's not like taking over your mother's job at McDonald's. You're in government. You have to know what you're doing."
Three decades of state government work, apparently, doesn't count.
To be clear about what actually happened here: a sitting governor used the authority granted under South Carolina Code of Laws, Section 7-19-20, to appoint a temporary replacement for a senator who died in office. A special Republican primary filing period opens July 21 through July 28, with the primary election set for August 11 and a general election on November 3. Graham isn't keeping the seat. She's a caretaker finishing her brother's term — which is exactly what co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin pointed out on-air. "You guys are putting too much stock in who's currently in Congress," Griffin said. Even Whoopi Goldberg conceded: "Yeah, you got a point."
Graham herself kept it simple when sworn in: "It is such a privilege to get to finish some of his important work. I promise to work hard every day over the next several months to support the president and carry forward the efforts of my brother on behalf of the citizens of South Carolina and the United States."
But here's what makes the DEI accusation so perfectly absurd. This practice — family members filling vacancies left by deceased members of Congress — has existed for roughly a century. Forty-eight women have historically filled congressional vacancies this way. Margaret Chase Smith started as a vacancy appointment and went on to serve 24 years in the Senate. Nobody on The View called that DEI.
Hostin's complaint that "it's just fundamentally wrong that South Carolina just couldn't elect a woman" ignores a rather inconvenient detail about the state she's criticizing. South Carolina elected Tim Scott — a Black Republican — three times statewide, with over 60% of the vote in 2014, 2016, and 2022. They elected Nikki Haley, an Indian-American woman, as governor twice. The state that supposedly needed DEI to get its first female senator has been electing diverse candidates by landslide margins for over a decade.
And then there's the comparison Griffin raised that Hostin didn't want to touch. In 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler to fill Dianne Feinstein's Senate seat after her death. Butler had never held elected office. She was a labor union president and political strategist. The View didn't call that DEI. They didn't question her qualifications. They didn't say government wasn't like McDonald's.
Hostin spent years defending diversity initiatives as essential policy, not patronage. Behar spent years arguing that representation matters more than résumés. Now a conservative woman breaks a barrier in a state they've written off as backward, and the first instinct is to delegitimize her.
The word for that used to be "DEI." Now apparently it's just called Tuesday on ABC.
