[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 20581-20582]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            EXTREME RHETORIC

  Mr. FLAKE. Mr. President, 6 months ago, on a beautiful June morning, 
just a few miles from here in Alexandria, VA, a man with a gun opened 
fire on me and several of my Republican colleagues.
  In the chaotic aftermath of that awful morning, the gunman's purpose 
slowly became clear. Because of our beliefs and our political 
affiliation, this individual believed my colleagues and I should die. 
Since that day, I struggled to understand this thinking. How could any 
American look onto a field that June morning, where a bunch of middle-
aged men were playing baseball, and see the enemy?
  Some of the bombastic rhetoric being offered this week in response to 
the tax reform bill has given me pause. If you listen to some of the 
hyperbolic vitriol that opponents of this bill are producing, the 
attitude that nearly killed my friend Steve Scalise and threatened many 
more lives begins to make a perverse kind of sense.
  When respectable public figures go on television or take to Twitter 
and announce that thousands, if not millions, of Americans are going to 
die as a direct result of the passage of a tax reform bill, what impact 
do we expect this to have on the thinking of many Americans? If a 
person takes such outlandish statements as true, attacking Members of 
Congress in support of the measure almost appears to be a moral action. 
This could lead someone to believe that killing a few legislators might 
save the lives of millions of Americans.
  Beyond the physical danger of promoting such misinformation, these 
claims do grave harm to the legislative process. How are we expected to 
work together to achieve anything if one side's position is viewed as 
the end of America as we know it? One of my colleagues called this tax 
reform bill ``the worst bill in the history of Congress.''
  Upon the bill's passage, one media pundit went so far as to encourage 
young Americans to flee their country and declared ``America died 
tonight.''
  Full-throated and passionate debate should always be encouraged. We 
all love arguing the merits of supply-side economics, but this is not 
that. This is demonizing of the worst kind. It leaves us all in this 
body unable to engage in the kind of negotiations and compromise that 
Congress was created to foster.
  To be clear, this is not a problem with one party or of one moment. 
During the public debate over the Affordable Care Act, Members of my 
party engaged in similar tactics. I was in the House Chamber when one 
of my Republican colleagues stood and yelled ``You lie'' at the 
President of the United States. The accusation that passage of 
healthcare reform legislation would result in so-called death panels 
was promoted far and wide by many Republicans. One conservative 
commentator suggested the government would begin educating seniors on 
how to end their own lives.
  A Republican legislator claimed that the bill would put seniors in a 
position of being ``put to death by their government.'' This rhetoric 
was wrong then, and it is wrong now.
  The threat posed to all of us and to the democratic process for 
giving in to extreme rhetoric is not theoretical. Some of us faced it 
on that baseball field in Alexandria in June, and all of us have 
witnessed its corrosive effect on Congress. I urge my colleagues, all 
of us, let's end this practice where raw politics drowns out the 
supplications of the better angels of our nature. Let us all be more 
humble as to our predictive

[[Page 20582]]

powers when it comes to placing a value on the work we do here. In 
reality, this legislation will probably not turn out to be as good as 
the proponents assert, nor as bad as the opponents contend.
  The country is watching. It is my hope that we--all of us--can eschew 
contempt and vitriol in our speech and be more measured in our tone.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.

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