Lisa Murkowski, Charles Sumner, and a cowardice crisis in Congress

Once, there was a U.S. senator from Massachusetts who had something he felt he had to say about America’s racial crisis, and whether the United States could survive as a democracy. Some of his colleagues urged him not to speak, fearful his words would provoke so much anger that someone might try to hurt him.

But in 1856, when the nation was riven in two over slavery, Sen. Charles Sumner wasn’t having it.

“When Sumner presented a draft of his speech to a few friends, Sen. William H. Seward of New York begged him to temper the message out of concern for Sumner’s safety,” Zaakir Tameez, author of the new Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “And yet, Sumner persisted, believing that a brave speech and its possibly violent ramifications could jolt the antislavery movement into action.”

That’s exactly how it played out. Sumner’s two-day-long speech called out “Slave Power” in American antebellum politics and named names, attacking a South Carolina senator named Andrew Butler. Two days later, a House member named Preston Brooks, who was Butler’s cousin, stormed into the Senate chamber and started beating Sumner repeatedly with a hard cane, nearly killing him.

But just as Sumner had predicted, his courageous stand built support for the liberty of enslaved African Americans. More than 169 years later, it is remembered as a key moment in a chain of events that led to Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election, the Civil War, and finally, the passage of the 13th Amendment that ended slavery.

In 2025, Sumner is having a bit of a moment — the perfectly timed book is getting a lot of attention — and it’s not hard to understand why. Yet again, Americans are wondering if our flawed experiment in democracy can survive. Nightly scenes of a masked secret police snatching law-abiding immigrants from city streets are stirring memories of the Fugitive Slave Act that Sumner so despised.

And yet, something feels very different this time around. With similar threats of physical violence and harassment in the air — greatly amplified by the invention of the internet — members of Congress are not, for the most part, following the example that made Sumner the stuff of statues. Some are keeping silent. Others are voting for legislation they privately abhor. A few will even talk about the thing that is holding them back, albeit usually off the record.

They are scared.

“We are all afraid,” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican and 23-year veteran of the chamber, said in April remarks to an Anchorage, Alaska, gathering of tribal leaders, which were recorded by a local paper and stunned national observers. She paused for a long time, then offered a longer answer to the question she’d been asked about political courage in the Donald Trump era.

“It’s quite a statement,” Murkowski went on. “We’re in a time and place where — I don’t know, I certainly have not — I have not been here before. And I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real. And that’s not right. But that’s what you’ve asked me to do, and so I’m going to use my voice to the best of my ability.”

Any hopes the Alaskan’s public confession would change this alarming state of affairs were dashed just over two months later. Murkowski emerged as the deciding vote on the 940-page grab bag of legislation that Trump called his “Big Beautiful Bill,” and came to view as his loyalty test for Republicans on Capitol Hill.

The senator heard the pleas of state officials and her constituents who were frightened about its planned reductions in Medicaid and food assistance — needed to pay for tax cuts that disproportionately benefit billionaires — that aimed to fall particularly hard on Alaska. She bargained for days for changes, and did get some, from relaxing rules and timelines, to a $50 billion national fund to aid rural hospitals, to other perks for a state that calls itself the Last Frontier. But she still hated the bill, and the intense pressure of Trump’s arbitrary July 4 deadline.

Murkowski voted for it anyway, knowing that a no vote would have killed the legislation that passed 51-50 on a tiebreaking vote from Vice President JD Vance.

“We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination,” she later told a reporter. “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.” In other words, she was begging someone in the other chamber to find the courage to defy Trump — and face an online fire hose of abuse, a possible primary challenge, and maybe even worse — because it was never going to be her.

Murkowski’s comments and her critical vote would have been alarming had they occurred in a vacuum. But her honesty about a climate of fear on Capitol Hill has been echoed by other colleagues who suggest what’s really behind the passage of such a pivotal bill is like nothing you ever saw on Schoolhouse Rock, that it more resembles the omertà-driven terror of the Gambino crime family.

Before leaving the Senate in January, former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney told his biographer McKay Coppins that personal safety concerns were a consideration for members of Congress when deciding how to vote during Trump’s second impeachment after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

“One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety,” Coppins wrote. “The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?”

» READ MORE: When politicians cheer American violence | Will Bunch Newsletter

These fears are hardly irrational. In the most violent moment for American politics since the 1960s’ wave of assassinations, elected officials are reporting increasing death threats and other intimidation. And, of course, the worst-case scenario became a reality last month in Minnesota, when a right-winger with a hit list posed as a cop to murder a former state House speaker and her husband, while seriously wounding a state senator and his wife.

In this climate, it’s not just Republicans — facing Trump’s ability to summon an online lynch mob and the possibility of a career-ending MAGA primary — who are admitting they are frightened to speak out, let alone act. Democrats, watching masked fascism in the streets of Los Angeles, and a full-frontal assault on pillars of democracy such as universities and a free press, are responding to party activists who want them to fight more forcefully with seemingly mixed feelings.

Axios recently reported that congressional Democrats “are facing a growing thrum of demands to break the rules, fight dirty — and not be afraid to get hurt.” At times, it feels as if there’s a “gag rule,” as existed before the Civil War, on tough talk or actions against Trump. They are, essentially, in the same place that Sumner and his contemporaries found themselves during the slavery crisis that threatened America in the early 19th century.

“In the 1830s and 1840s, Southern congressmen routinely threatened Northerners — especially antislavery Northerners — with violence to scare them into compliance and silence,“ Joanne B. Freeman, a Yale University historian who authored Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, told me. ”And for a time, it worked. Better to keep your head down than to risk physical harm or humiliation.”

That changed, she said, when Northern voters started sending fiery antislavery activists like Sumner to Washington in the 1850s. By facing up to the threat of violence, the risk-takers of Capitol Hill and the voters who demanded more from them triggered the cycle of events that would eventually abolish slavery. Freeman said, “In some ways, that’s precisely where we are now.”

She’s right, but it seems like in the present crisis, we still have a long way to go. We want our elected representatives to be safe, and if Congress wants to spend more on its own security, it should. But as we learned yet again on July 4 in the Texas floodwaters, America is at its greatest when its citizens risk everything to save others.

We expect bravery from our first responders and from our troops. It doesn’t seem too much to simply ask that our senators and House members speak the truth about the dangers to democracy and vote their conscience, not their fears. Even if that makes their life uncomfortable and, yes, even if that raises the risk of something worse.

And if the current crew on Capitol Hill can’t do this, they should be replaced — much as happened 170 years ago. Right now, a would-be John F. Kennedy and his ghostwriters would never be able to write a sequel to Profiles in Courage. But thankfully, the final chapters are yet to be written.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter