Politics & Power Quote by Sherrod Brown

A populist indictment dressed in policy language, Sherrod Brown is doing what he does best: turning a wonky legislative fight into a moral drama about power and who gets heard. The sentence is built to make “energy bill” sound less like governance and more like capture. “Let the energy companies write” isn’t a claim about drafting logistics; it’s a charge of corruption-by-delegation, implying Congress outsourced its job to the very interests it’s meant to regulate. The verb “let” matters: it paints Republican leadership as permissive, not merely mistaken, and frames the harm as foreseeable.

“Sent prices soaring” supplies the kitchen-table consequence that justifies the outrage. Brown collapses the complex chain from statute to markets into a clean cause-and-effect story, because the political goal isn’t to teach economics; it’s to assign responsibility. Then he pivots to character. “Turned a blind eye” suggests not ignorance but chosen indifference, the kind of neglect that reads as contempt. The target isn’t only a bill, but a governing posture: attentive to donors, inattentive to families.

The phrase “working families trying to make ends meet” is deliberate cultural shorthand. It’s an invitation to self-identify with the injured party and to see the opposition as serving an out-group: energy executives. In the context of recurring spikes in gas and heating costs, and long-running debates over industry influence in Washington, Brown’s intent is to fuse pocketbook pain to a narrative of rigged rules - and to make that narrative stick to a partisan label.