"Difficult times require difficult decisions. But supporting this bill shouldn't be a difficult decision"
About this Quote
Crisis language is a politician's favorite staging device: it lowers expectations, narrows the menu, and makes dissent feel irresponsible. Jim Bunning opens with that familiar grim truism, "Difficult times require difficult decisions", a line that grants him the aura of seriousness while conceding public anxiety. Then he snaps the frame shut: "But supporting this bill shouldn't be a difficult decision". The pivot is the whole trick. He borrows the moral gravity of hardship and immediately converts it into a demand for ease - not in governing, but in voting the way he wants.
The intent is coercively calming. If you're a wavering colleague, the sentence offers an exit ramp from uncertainty: you can look courageous without doing the hard work of weighing tradeoffs. If you're the public, it pre-emptively delegitimizes skepticism. In hard times, citizens expect sacrifice and complexity; Bunning counters by implying the bill is so obviously right that only politics, not principle, could complicate it.
The subtext is a gentle accusation: if you find this decision difficult, the problem is you. It's a rhetorical move that polices the boundaries of reasonable debate, especially common in moments like recessions, wars, or emergency financial votes, when legislators try to compress messy policy into a binary test of character.
What makes the line effective is its asymmetry. It acknowledges hardship to sound honest, then denies hardship to foreclose argument. It's persuasion by emotional bookkeeping: he spends the currency of "difficult times" to buy consensus on a specific bill, hoping no one checks the receipt.
The intent is coercively calming. If you're a wavering colleague, the sentence offers an exit ramp from uncertainty: you can look courageous without doing the hard work of weighing tradeoffs. If you're the public, it pre-emptively delegitimizes skepticism. In hard times, citizens expect sacrifice and complexity; Bunning counters by implying the bill is so obviously right that only politics, not principle, could complicate it.
The subtext is a gentle accusation: if you find this decision difficult, the problem is you. It's a rhetorical move that polices the boundaries of reasonable debate, especially common in moments like recessions, wars, or emergency financial votes, when legislators try to compress messy policy into a binary test of character.
What makes the line effective is its asymmetry. It acknowledges hardship to sound honest, then denies hardship to foreclose argument. It's persuasion by emotional bookkeeping: he spends the currency of "difficult times" to buy consensus on a specific bill, hoping no one checks the receipt.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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