House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Thursday that “we cannot let what happened yesterday be the norm,” as he decried political violence in the aftermath of Kirk’s death.
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen politics degrading where some people feel if they disagree with you politically, they’ve got to try to go and eliminate those people,” Scalise said on “CBS Mornings.” “That is not what America is. You know, we solve our differences at the ballot box.”
Scalise said of Kirk that “even if people disagreed with him, he wasn’t calling them names, he would engage and talk about the differences.”
“We’ve got to get back to that,” he said.
Scalise, who was shot by a gunman in 2017 at a practice for the annual congressional baseball game, said “it was hard to focus” on the House floor Wednesday night because “my mind just kept going back to Charlie and his family, surely went back to 2017 in the shooting where, you know, a crazed gunman tried to kill me and about a dozen other members of Congress because of our political beliefs.”
“This can’t be allowed to be acceptable,” he said.
Asked what a more constructive conversation looks like, and the role Congress plays in lowering the temperature, Scalise said “one of the greatest things of America is that we do have differences and that we can express them.”
“Celebrate the fact that we have differences and we can freely express them, and don’t allow anybody to try to threaten somebody, to try to physically attack somebody for their differences,” Scalise said.