WASHINGTON — Lawmakers across both chambers reacted with profound shock and dismay this weekend upon discovering that the years of rhetoric describing political opponents as vermin, demons, parasites, and threats to the republic had, against all reasonable expectation, been overheard.
The realization came following the murder of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their home Saturday morning, alongside the shooting of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife in a related attack. The suspect, who reportedly impersonated a police officer, was carrying a list of nearly seventy names — a development that sent a measurable shudder through several state capitols where lawmakers privately wondered, for the first time in their careers, whether being a state senator counted as a job with consequences.
“You’d be surprised how many guys are calling our office today asking very specific questions about the list,” said a staffer at a Midwestern statehouse who asked not to be named because his boss had asked him not to be named. “Like, not ‘is political violence bad’ questions. More ‘am I on it’ questions. Then ‘how do I find out without it looking like I’m asking’ questions.”
By Saturday afternoon, statements began arriving from the same political figures who, as recently as Thursday, had been describing the opposing party as a cancer on the nation, an existential enemy, a demonic infestation, and — in one creative variation — “not Americans in any meaningful sense of the word.” The new statements were notable for their tasteful restraint, their careful invocation of shared humanity, and their conspicuous failure to mention any of the previous statements.
One press release issued by a Republican congressman who has spent eighteen consecutive months referring to Democrats as “the enemy within” condemned political violence as “a stain on our democracy” and called for “a serious national conversation about lowering the temperature.” The release was sent from the same email list that, earlier in the week, had solicited donations to defeat “the radical communist parasites who hate this country.”
Sources within Capitol Hill confirmed that the standard procedural response was already underway: a moment of silence, a bipartisan statement no one will read, a brief flurry of cable news segments featuring people calling for unity, and then, by approximately Wednesday, a return to fundraising emails describing the opposing caucus as a coordinated threat to civilization. “We have a system,” one veteran aide explained. “It’s worked since Gabby Giffords. It’ll work again.”
Several lawmakers reportedly inquired whether enhanced security details might be made available, only to be informed that state legislators are largely on their own, security-wise, and that the federal government’s protective resources are currently committed to guarding the people who go on television calling state legislators traitors.
At press time, the Speaker of the Minnesota House had not yet decided whether the moment of silence for Representative Hortman should be held before or after the floor debate in which her colleagues will be referred to as enemies of the people, though aides indicated they were leaning toward before, out of respect.