Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) likes memes. How do we know? Because this is a poster that the junior senator from Connecticut used in a Thursday afternoon floor speech about a Republican lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act.
@thegarance pic.twitter.com/bwI0W9VlKm
— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) May 21, 2015
That’s right: a shruggie, one of Twitter‘s favorite text memes.
“This is a pretty good summary of what the Republicans’ plan is to respond to King v. Burwell,” Murphy said.
The King case, which the Supreme Court is expected to decide this summer, involves a challenge to the Obama administration’s authority to provide insurance subsidies to people who live in states that didn’t set up their own healthcare exchanges, which the ACA recommended. If the challengers win, subsidies will stop flowing to people on the federal healthcare exchange, which could result in millions of people losing their insurance.
In response, Murphy said, Republicans in Congress offered little more than “a shrug of the shoulders.”
In case you need Murphy’s poster translated fully into ASCII art, it’s this:
|￣￣￣￣￣ ￣|
— Eric Geller (@ericgeller) May 21, 2015
| ¯_(ツ)_/¯ |
| ＿＿＿＿＿＿ |
(__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ づ https://t.co/07GaKX0l6I
Reactions to the congressional shruggie were mixed.
https://twitter.com/imbeccable/status/601477917336576002
guys do not reward the politician using memes
— Philip Bump (@pbump) May 21, 2015
https://twitter.com/labuzamovies/status/601480511207387136
The shruggie was a big hit among journalists, of course, particularly those congressional reporters sitting around wishing they had a big story to cover. (This reporter includes himself in that group.)
~2075~
— Sylvan Lane (@SylvanLane) May 21, 2015
“Grandpa what was the most important story you covered?”
“Let me tell you about the first Senate shruggie…” https://t.co/mVHGXLdMlh
https://twitter.com/BrettLoGiurato/status/601477606723182593
https://twitter.com/sara_bee/status/601480635006484480
https://twitter.com/b_fung/status/601481516787576835
https://twitter.com/libbycwatson/status/601480559135739905
Darth, meanwhile, just went on doing his thing.
https://twitter.com/darth/status/601482309817204736
https://twitter.com/darth/status/601479282188222465
Perhaps Murphy was excited to learn that the shruggie was among the 38 new emoji that the Unicode Consortium will introduce next year.
Screengrab via C-SPAN
