Any body labled a Senate typically sucks. It can’t be counted on. Most of its members are more beholden to donors and special interests than to the people. We need to repeal the seventeenth amendment, but that’s not happening anytime soon, so we’re stuck with this swampiest of drags on meaningful reform.
That’s not to say any part of Congress is of much value. Democrat Majorities ram through awful stuff while Republicans watch, and Republican majorities do as little as possible to avoid pissing off the people who get them elected. Donors and special interests.
I will allow for the opportunity for them to prove that wrong, but I am going to push back on headlines claiming Senate Republicans caved to Democrats on DHS funding. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Democrats caved.
Democrats “shut down” the Department of Homeland Security with a very specific set of goals. Force restrictive rules of engagement on ICE and CBP. They thought they had a pretty good plan that inevitably produced significant hardship for regular Americans trying to use airports.
ICE and CBP are already funded through 2029.
Republicans agreed to a deal in which all of DHS gets funded except CPB and ICE, which is already funded, in exchange for Democrats getting nothing they wanted.
Here’s the sequence:
- Democrats forced another government shutdown, which defunded TSA, not ICE, since ICE was already funded, to punish Americans for border enforcement.
- President Trump sends ICE to the airport to help TSA out.
- Then Trump vows to pay TSA anyway, daring Dems to sue him.
- Democrat opposition collapses and budget is approved unanimously.
Democrats are now less likely to suffer through campaign commercials about how they put America at risk for nothing, unless you count snarling up the travel plans of regular Jane and Joe Sixpack.
ICE can continue to do everything it is legally charged with, free from interference from Shutdown Schumer and his band of cave monkeys, who gave in not long after Trump said, “We’re paying TSA agents anyway. It was a move that won’t get nearly the column inches for genius that it deserves.
Dems hoped the inconvenience and discomfort they caused would spark some sort of middle-class uprising that would force Senate Republicans to give in to their demands. The pain was real, and it was clearly connected to the Dems standoff, but as we reported last week, ICE is more popular than the Democrat party, and the moment Trump announced his Administration was going to find the money to pay our dedicated, hardworking TSA agents, Schumer’s scheme was unsustainable.
Option one: sue Trump to stop him from paying TSA and curing the airport pain. Option two: admit defeat and pretend they’d won because the DHS budget package has no money for ICE (that already has and doesn’t even need). Which brings me to headlines saying Senate Republicans caved.
Bullshit and quite the opposite.
Trump and the Senate cornered the Dems, exposed their scam, and got everything they needed, but that’s not the end of the story. House GOP leaders don’t like the compromise. Speaker Johnson said.
“This gambit that was done last night is a joke. I’m quite convinced that it can’t be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill,” Johnson said, going on to read the Senate-passed bill language that provides zero dollars for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border security operations.
Johnson implied that Trump was aware of what the House was on about, so there is a layer of this onion yet to be peeled, and I’m curious to see what it is.
The President and the House are playing chess. The Senate is playing Chutes and Ladders. Trump and House Republicans know full well that immigration enforcement is a solid 80-20 issue, maybe the best one of all, and which propelled the GOP’s 2024 victory. The Democrats had caved, true, but not deeply enough. …
“These people want open borders, and they want criminal illegal aliens in the country,” Speaker Johnson said, leaning into the politics. “They want to literally defund —give zero dollars— to enforcing federal immigration law and keeping the border secure.” He shook his head in quiet rage. “That was the biggest issue in the 2024 election,” the Speaker reminded reporters, who were the only ones who needed reminding.
Dems still can’t sue Trump over the TSA payment thing. The optics are terrible. They could find a third party to do the dirty deed, ala a District Court Judge like Boasberg. That could happen, but then that judge would be the face of long lines at airports, four and five-hour wait times, and ICE agents patrolling those facilities – which Dems made happen and really don’t want either.
And Senate Republicans still suck. They need to ditch the filibuster and go about ramming through everything with 51-vote majorities because that is exactly what Democrats would be doing. You were not elected to save your own asses; you are there to help save America, even if it means saving it from Republican sin in the US Senate.
Trump and the House appear prepared to make them do just that, so are they in on this, or not?
