The Giffords Attack & the Congressional Past

A better comparison, perhaps, is to the right-wing vitriol of the early 1960s, most prominently seen when Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson campaigned in Dallas in 1960. An anti-liberal mob—mobilized by the far-right Dallas congressman Bruce Alger, who claimed that LBJ had sold out to “Yankee socialists”—greeted the Johnsons, with one protester spitting at Lady Bird.

But there’s no 1960s equivalent for Sarah Palin’s infamous “bulls-eye” campaign poster targeting specific representatives; or for the threats against individual members of Congress after passage of the health care bill. (Giffords, as is now widely known, was targeted in both events.) When roll-call votes, much less the ins and outs of political maneuvering, were not widely reported or easily uncovered, it simply was too difficult to connect grassroots extremists to individual members of Congress. In the internet era, that is no longer the case.

There is one era of congressional history in which violence and threats of violence against Members was commonplace: the years before the start of the Civil War, best seen in the caning of Charles Sumner. Yet that historical analogy, too, seems a flawed one for the contemporary era.

Members of Congress have engaged in a lot of very intemperate rhetoric over the past couple of years. But there’s a sense—even from the most intemperate of the lot, representatives like Steve King or Louie Gohmert or Alan Grayson, or someone like Sharron Angle speaking of “second amendment solutions”—that it’s all a game, since in the 24-7 cable environment, extreme rhetoric is what gets people in Congress noticed. (How imbalanced listeners might interpret this rhetoric is another matter.) In the pre-Civil War era, on the other hand, extremists on both sides seemed to really believe what they said.

So if no clear historical analogies exist for the political environment that culminated in the Giffords attack, how can history provide some assistance? Probably the clearest area is in the realm of security. There’s no equivalent of Secret Service protection for Members of Congress—for good reason. Unlike the President, an effective member of the House or Senate must spend considerable time at home, in small meetings, with his or her constituents. But just as successful and attempted attacks on the President led to the round-the-clock security regime that now exists, so too does the attack on Giffords (coupled with the rise in threats over the past few years) suggest that law enforcement will have to do more to protect Members of Congress. How they will strike a balance between security and accessibility outside of Washington will be a major topic for Congress in coming years.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor has announced that the House will defer votes next week, and Speaker Boehner issued a strong statement denouncing the attempted assassination. Reaction from Tea Party representatives has been less conciliatory: take, for instance, the almost sneering response to the shootings from Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips, who wrote, “Congressman Giffords was a liberal, but that does not matter now.” Giffords actually is a moderate, and she is, of course, a congresswoman, not a congressman. Phillips’ remarks focused, however, on criticizing “liberal websites” and the “far left,” and fantastically concluded, “While we need to take a moment to extend our sympathies to the families of those who died, we cannot allow the hard left to do what it tried to do in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing.”

Perhaps when the economy improves, political rhetoric will either cool on its own, or it will no longer serve its purposes. But until then, while the attack likely will lead to some short-term, cosmetic changes in political climate, there’s little reason to expect that the attack on Giffords will lead to any significant change in the nation’s political culture.