Just last week, there seemed to be consensus among political leaders that it was time to cool down the heated rhetoric traded between partisans in the nation’s capital, an idea pitched as a plan to show the value of building relationships across the aisle in the wake of a mass shooting that targeted Republican congressmen at a baseball practice.
Whether or not that heated rhetoric can be blamed for shooting is debatable — I believe firmly it cannot — but there is nothing wrong with taking the incident as a reminder for politicians to speak responsibly, knowing that constituents outside the circles of influence in Washington are listening.
Flash forward one week, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is saying Republicans plan to pay for their newly-released healthcare bill with “blood money.”
This was no slip of the tongue, but a calculated communications strategy. The phrase showed up twice in her speech on the Senate floor and then made its way into posts on Warren’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
She made a conscious decision to accuse her colleagues of intentionally taking “blood money” from sick Americans and giving it to their “rich buddies.”
Here’s one portion of her Senate speech:
So Senate Republicans had to make a choice. How to pay for all these juicy tax cuts for their rich buddies? I’ll tell you how: blood money. Senate Republicans wrung some extra dollars out of kicking people off tax credits that help them afford health insurance.
She continued on to say later in the speech, “Senate Republicans are paying for tax cuts for the wealthy with American lives,” a phrase she also included in her tweet and Facebook post.
For what it’s worth, here are the definitions of blood money:
- a fee paid to a hired murderer.
- compensation paid to the next of kin of a slain person.
- money obtained ruthlessly and at a cost of suffering to others.
- money paid to an informer in order to cause somebody to be arrested, convicted, or especially executed.
Warren also claimed the bill was the product of Senate Republicans “sitting around a conference room table, dreaming up even meaner ways to kick dirt in the face of the American people and take away their health insurance.”
None of what the senator said above is literal, unless she believes her Republican colleagues are carrying out mass murder and giving the money to their friends, or that they were deliberately fantasizing about ways to take insurance away from their constituents. Instead, the language is hyperbole meant to illustrate, as Warren sees it, the severity of the risk posed by the legislation.
But her words imply there is a deliberate effort, even a conspiracy, in the Republican Party to pass legislation that kills people and transfers the money saved by cutting the lifesaving regulations to the wealthy. One need look no further than the definitions of “blood money” included above to see the effect of her hyperbole is an accusation that her colleagues across the aisle are facilitating murder.
Does Warren believe that? I doubt it. But if she does, the voters of Massachusetts better get rid of her at their next electoral opportunity. There are, of course, probably some people on the radical Left who do think Republicans are out for blood and will defend it vehemently, just as there are some on the fringes of the Republican party who believe the same to be true of Democrats.
That’s fine. We just shouldn’t elect them to Congress.
More likely, Warren believes Republicans put too much faith in the free markets that made many of them wealthy and do not see how, in her mind, less government regulation will hurt people who have come to rely on it, making it extremely difficult for some to afford life-saving care.
You can argue, and she may, that speaking in hyperbole — which is not a strategy isolated to the Democratic side — is necessary to seize the attention of distracted voters and persuade them to care about serious and immediate concerns. But anyone who called for Congress to approach their jobs and communicate in a more cooperative and respectful spirit last week should also call on Warren to cool it.
And the same goes for anyone who believes it’s dangerous for President Trump to speak in rhetoric meant to be taken seriously, but not literally.
If you were moved by the images from the Congressional Baseball Game, where Republicans and Democrats came together to honor Rep. Steve Scalise as he sat in critical condition in a nearby hospital, don’t forget that Warren just told the people that Scalise’s colleagues in the Senate, some of whom played in that game, are willfully sucking “blood money” from the vulnerable, just to help the rich get richer.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
