Senators Using Emoticons In Floor Charts Is Now a Thing
Members of Congress are using emoticons to make political points.
— -- The “shrug” emoticon is just a combination of punctuation marks, but for Senate Democrats like Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, it speaks volumes.
Whitehouse brought a sign featuring little more than the now-universal signal for “I don’t know” to the Senate floor, as he and some Democratic colleagues discussed what they said was the Republican Party’s lack of a plan on climate change.
“We’ve seen exactly nothing,” he said. “That is to say, nothing but complaints.”
The use of a shrug emoticon is more than just a ploy for a senator to get people tweeting out CSPAN screengrabs of their floor speeches (which it does) — it’s part of an organized policy strategy, said Whitehouse’s spokesman Seth Larson.
“It’s a graphic that we worked with Senate Democratic leadership to put together to highlight the fact that the Republicans call the clean power plan a war on coal but at the end of the day they try changing the subject or ignore the reality,” Larson said. “We wanted to drive point home: the Republicans have no credibility, have no plan of their own.”
Larson likened this debate to that over the Affordable Care Act, which he said Republicans complained about but had no plan of their own, and added that using an emoticon is a way to infuse humor to convey a serious point.
And it’s not the first time the shrug has appeared on the Senate floor. Back in May, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, also a Democrat, used it to demonstrate what he said was the GOP’s plan to respond to the Supreme Court if it decided that Obamacare subsidies in states that were using the federal health exchange were in fact unconstitutional.
ABC's Robin Gradison contributed reporting.