Female senators feel brunt of Republican anger over healthcare as insults fly

Two female Republican lawmakers have become embroiled in infighting over efforts to abolish Obamacare, with the tone of the fierce debate said to be increasingly sexist.    

Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski earned a high profile rebuke from Donald Trump this week for her opposition to efforts to amend the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Yet the president's language was comparatively mild compared to some of the threats being thrown around.

Ms Murkowski and Senator Susan Collins, from Maine, were challenged to a duel for not supporting Republican health-care proposals.

Criticising some Republican “female senators from the Northeast”, Blake Farenthold, a Republican from Corpus Christi, Texas, said: “If it was a guy from south Texas I might ask him to step outside and settle this Aaron Burr-style.”

Mr Farenthold was referring to the 1804 duel in which Burr shot and killed former treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.

Georgia Republican Congressman Buddy Carter, meanwhile, defended Mr Trump's calling out of Ms Murkowski in colourful terms.

"Let me tell you, somebody needs to go over there to that Senate and snatch a knot in their ass," Mr Carter told MSNBC. 

Ms Murkowski also said she received a "difficult" call from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, adding that "it was not a very pleasant call".

The insults have added to the injury of Republican women in the Senate being excluded from the chamber’s original working group on health care.

Some believe the insults have escalated thanks to the videotape of Mr Trump that emerged during the campaign, in which he boasted in vulgar terms about groping women.

“Masculine dominance in the Republican Party is not only in numbers but in culture,” Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Centre for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told the Washington Post. 

“When the person who is supposed to be the leader of the party shows it’s okay to use those sorts of attacks, whether they are specifically gendered or not, that is something that catches on at other levels,” Ms Dittmar said. “We see it in the [elected officials] who feel it’s okay to say things like this.”

Julie A. Conway, executive director of VIEW PAC, which recruits and trains Republican female candidates, told the Post that "some folks are spending so much time creating cute catchy phrases in order to take potshots at colleagues".

“I wish they would spend as much time and energy sitting down with these women lawmakers to help find solutions and a strategy to get real health-care reform that Americans can feel good about," she said.