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Watch: Did Democrat Just Call for Violence in Response to the Proposed Abortion Ban?

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Sen. Maize Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, closed a speech from Wednesday the floor of the United States Senate with something virtually unheard of, a literal, “call to arms,” against fellow Americans.

In the five-minute address, Hirono lambasted the “extreme far-right Supreme Court” for their “horrendous decision,” and accused Republicans of “pandering to their extreme MAGA base” with the introduction of a 15-week abortion ban.

She declared that “allowing Republicans to regain control of Congress would be catastrophic, not only for women but for our entire country.”

“Do you want to let extreme MAGA Republicans tell you what you can and can’t do with your own body?” she asked.

(The whole speech can be viewed here. Hirono’s segment starts about the 5:16 mark.)

Hirono called the Republican Senators “hypocrites” and accused them of “an outright attack on women in this country,” before closing with the comment, “I yield the floor. But clearly, this is, literally, a call to arms in our country.”


A “call to arms” can be taken in two ways according to Merriam-Webster, as either “a summons to engage in active hostilities,” or “a summons, invitation, or appeal to undertake a particular course of action.”

For many viewers, Hirono’s could be seen as the former.

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Others defended Hirono’s comments as simple exaggeration.

There’s little question that Hirono’s inflammatory rhetoric would be treated by the mainstream media differently if it had been spoken by a Republican. However, all speech on the floor of the Senate or House of Representatives is protected by the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent.

Do you think Hirono was seriously calling for armed violence over abortion?

According to the Congressional Research Service, senators and representatives “speaking or acting on the House or Senate floor” are “as the Court has repeatedly stated… ‘immune from liability for their actions within the ‘legislative sphere,’ even though their conduct, if performed in other than legislative contexts, would in itself be unconstitutional or otherwise contrary to criminal or civil statutes.'”

In the Constitution, Article 1, Section 6 states  that “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they [members] shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

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