Louisiana GOP Rep. Steve Scalise, a man who was literally shot by a gunman and then returned to work alongside colleagues, has discovered his fainting couch over two numbers typed by a congressman from California.
The outrage: Ted Lieu wrote "86 47" in a tweet. That's it. That's the crime. A sitting member of Congress, a Stanford graduate, a JAG officer and Air Force veteran, typed four digits into a text box — digits that, as legal experts note, refer to getting rid of someone (as in, at the ballot box or via impeachment, or with restaurants, 86 means they are out of a particular item, so remove it off the menu) — and Scalise ran straight to Fox Business to perform cardiac arrest about it.
"I also want to ask you about this, because California Democrat Ted Lieu posted the phrase 8647 on X," the host said. "This directly references the slogan at the heart of James Comey's indictment."And the congressman framed the post as a prediction of failure of the DOJ, suggesting the case against Comey is going to collapse and that he'll win damages for selective prosecution. And then active excuse me, acting AG Todd Blanche, he says, is going to be disbarred in all of this."
"But this is just days after President Trump faced a third assassination attempt at the White House Correspondent's Dinner," she added. "I want to get your reaction to these comments from Ted Lieu."
"It's disgusting," Scalise insisted. "And frankly, you know, when you look at now the third, as you mentioned, assassination attempt on President Trump, we've seen a rise in political violence from the left. It's not happening on both sides. Everybody knows that."
Fact check: Melissa Hortman, a murdered Democratic lawmaker, her husband, Mark, and their dog, Gilb, would disagree.
"And it's language like that," he continued. "It's rhetoric like that, inciting just the far left base of the party, some of these unhinged people. And it only takes one in the case of this California man who just decided, I'm going to take a train to California and try to kill the president and everybody else in that room."
"That was his intention," he said. "I was there. It was chaos."
"But, you know, if they didn't stop him, his intention was to kill everybody because he's seeing this kind of insightful language from the left," he continued. "They need to stop saying these kind of things and recognize it's having an impact and trying to incite people to go kill other Americans."
"I mean, do you have any humanity and care for your fellow human being?" he added.
This is the same Steve Scalise who has said nothing of consequence about Trump's 2024 Truth Social post featuring an image of Biden hog-tied in the back of a truck. Nothing about "enemies from within." Nothing about suggestions to jail political opponents. Not a peep about the violent imagery his own party's leader traffics in weekly.
But Ted Lieu types "86 47" — after explicitly stating it means DOJ will lose the Comey case — and suddenly Scalise is clutching pearls so hard you'd think he'd found a new career in jewelry. 86 Steve Scalise. I said what I said.
