GOP rep: Police arrested man over death threats

Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that Capitol Police had arrested a man for making death threats over his stance on the House bill to repeal and replace ObamaCare.

MacArthur said Thursday that he didn’t know the current status of the suspect, only that officers had traveled to New Jersey to make the arrest.

“Like a lot of members, I’ve had a number of death threats and one of them was serious enough that the Capitol Police went to New Jersey yesterday and they arrested somebody,” MacArthur said on Thursday.

“It started over healthcare,” he said. “[The threats] are serious, and they are ramping up.”

{mosads}MacArthur is a second-term legislator who was crucial in the effort to pass the House’s bill to replace ObamaCare. He told the Examiner that the death threats started during the House negotiations.

Capitol Police, he said, “put this one through their threat assessment unit and they simply alerted my office that this one rose to a level where they had to act.”

The arrest comes two weeks after Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and several others were injured in a shooting in Virginia. The attacker, who briefly volunteered for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) presidential campaign, allegedly had a list of Republican lawmakers on his person at the time of the shooting.

“I get there are going to be policy disagreements,” MacArthur told the Examiner, “but it’s not helpful if people ascribe bad motives to me, and it’s not helpful if we ascribe bad motives to other people.”