Politics & Power Quote by Louise Slaughter

Slaughter’s line does what effective political rhetoric often does: it makes moral reciprocity feel nonnegotiable. By opening with “Women in the service,” she foregrounds a group long treated as both indispensable and, too often, administratively invisible. The sentence builds a plainspoken bargain: they accept risk “to protect us and our Nation,” so the nation owes them protection in return. It’s a framing move that preempts the usual objections about cost, bureaucracy, or “special treatment” by recasting policy as basic fairness.

The phrase “harms way” (grammatically off, emotionally on) works like a small tell of urgency. She’s not polishing prose; she’s tightening a moral vise. And “threats at home and abroad” intentionally stretches the battlefield beyond foreign wars, nodding to a post-9/11 security imagination where danger is everywhere and service members are always on call. That broad scope implicitly argues that the duty of care should be just as expansive.

The subtext lands hardest in “a horrible tragedy,” a euphemism that likely points to sexual assault or gender-based violence in the military without naming it. That avoidance isn’t accidental; it’s a strategic way to keep the coalition wide in a culture where explicit language about assault can trigger defensiveness, denial, or partisan reflex. Slaughter’s intent is to shift the conversation from whether the institution has a “problem” to whether the country is willing to keep its side of the contract. “The least we can do” is the knife: it shames inaction while making the proposed protections sound like the bare minimum of decency.