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Sen. Chris Murphy just used ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in a floor speech because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Eric Geller

Tech

Posted on May 21, 2015   Updated on May 28, 2021, 6:54 pm CDT

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.

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:

Reactions to the congressional shruggie were mixed.

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.)

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.

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

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*First Published: May 21, 2015, 6:05 pm CDT