No, it's not "treason"

My friend Michael Berry, a lawyer and talk-radio host, this week performed a real service when one of his more excitable listeners called in to suggest that a federal judge, who had put the kibosh on the president’s No-Muslims-Well-That’s-Not-Exactly-What-We-Mean-But-Mostly-No-Muslims executive order, ought to be charged with murder. If you close your eyes and work yourself into the sort of state where your anger begins to bring down your IQ, you can just about see the reasoning: If the judge prevents policy X from being enacted, and people die who might have been saved by policy X, then those who opposed policy X are complicit in those deaths and hence guilty of murder. Berry very carefully explained what it takes for an action to add up to murder, but I fear he may as well have been talking to a pumpkin. Once someone develops a real taste for rage, it is a hard habit to break: Democrats, and not only the ones who call in to talk-radio programs, have been offering more or less the same murder indictment regarding the American Health Care Act. Phil Wilson of the Black AIDS Institute called the act “genocide.”

Genocide.

Really.

Democrats ranging from Senator Elizabeth Warren to Senator Bernie Sanders suggested that the Republicans were using legislation to intentionally inflict death on thousands of Americans in order to score a few political points. You can move from a dispute over insurance regulation to accusations of mass murder pretty quickly, provided you are either dumb or dishonest enough.