But Saturday’s tragedy jolted some lawmakers into introspection. Lamar Alexander, a Republican senator from Tennessee, told CNN’s State of the Union, “We ought to tone it down, treat each other with great respect, respect each other’s ideas, and even on difficult issues like immigration or taxes or health care law, do our best not to inflame passions.” A Democratic senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, said members of Congress need to keep political discussion at a “higher level” and not “descend into even these images of violence or violent reaction.”
Some lawmakers went so far as to call for limits on speech. South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, the third most senior Democrat in Congress, urged a return to the Fairness Doctrine—a 1949 policy that required licensed broadcasters to cover controversial public issues in a manner deemed equitable and balanced by the Federal Communications Commission (Reagan abolished the policy in 1987). “Free speech is as free speech does,” Clyburn said, according to Charleston’s Post and Courier newspaper. “You cannot yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre and call it free speech, and some of what I hear, and is being called free speech, is worse than that.”
Others recoiled at the idea that speech causes violence. The comedian Jon Stewart, who last year hosted a “Rally to Restore Sanity” on the National Mall that demonstrated against overheated political rhetoric, stopped short of blaming it for the shooting. On Monday’s Daily Show, he said, “I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric any more than I would blame heavy metal music for Columbine,” referring to the 1999 massacre at a Colorado high school that left 12 innocent students and one teacher dead. But Stewart added that political discourse should be more responsible. “It would be really nice if the ramblings of crazy people didn’t in any way resemble how we actually talk to each other on TV,” he said.
There were indications that lawmakers were becoming more careful in their choice of words, including scrutiny of the title of the Republicans’ legislation that would repeal the Obama health care law: the Repeal the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act. After lawmakers held a moment of silence in honour of the Tucson shooting’s victims in front of the U.S. Capitol on Monday, the incoming chairman of the energy and commerce committee, Republican Fred Upton of Michigan, was asked by reporters whether the title of the bill should be changed. “Um, it’s a new question,” Upton said. “It’s, you know, we’ll see.”
And there were other signs that the most militant political rhetoric was becoming unpalatable. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, touted as a potential presidential candidate rival to Sarah Palin, distanced himself from her map with the gun-sights symbols. “It wouldn’t have been my style to put the crosshairs on there,” Pawlenty said Tuesday on ABC’s Good Morning America. And, he told the New York Times, “I wouldn’t have done that.”
Elsewhere, though, the airwaves remained hot. Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh continued to lash out at the political left. “In continuing this template and narrative that the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, that talk radio and Fox News, are inspiring violence, they forget that, in the process of so doing, they are attacking what is now a majority of America,” Limbaugh said. “They are accusing a majority of Americans of being accomplices to murder.”
Congressional analyst Ornstein, who had discussed such rhetoric with Giffords, is doubtful that the tragedy would lead to any lasting changes in gun laws, or laws dealing with the mentally ill, or even to the political tone. “I do think this will change the discourse in the short run, toning down the worst excesses,” he told Maclean’s. “And that might last for a few months at the outside.”
