Bluesky

It’s a bit too on the nose, metaphorically speaking, that the latest example of the utter prostration of our national legislature before an unhinged and power-mad executive branch concerns the failure to competently manage air travel. Senseless holding patterns, traffic bottlenecks, unscheduled delays and pointless marathon waits in line—the many indignities of flying almost perfectly mirror the business model of Congress in the Trump 2.0 era. 

Just consider the ludicrous series of legislative self-owns that have produced the present, feckless crisis at US airports. In response to ICE’s nationwide reign of terror, congressional Democrats blocked additional money for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the latest government-funding deadline approached. Their quite reasonable demand was for some basic reforms to tamp down ICE’s most egregious abuses—for example, requiring agents to wear bodycams and banning them from wearing masks. (In reality, nothing about this corps of brownshirts mustered to implement Stephen Miller’s punitive racist fantasies is  reformable, but that is a sermon for another occasion.)  

House Republicans refused to go along with this plan and approved their own DHS funding bill without the ICE restrictions. That bill predictably ran aground in the Senate, where it couldn’t surmount the filibuster requirement of 60 votes in the face of unified Democratic opposition. 

Meanwhile, with American airports increasingly resembling Soviet-era supermarkets and polling showing that a majority of Americans correctly blamed Republicans for their latest non-governing clusterfuck, the Trump White House intervened as only the Trump White House can: by mobilizing ICE agents to replace the TSA workers left unpaid by the dilatory GOP. Not only was this an act of ludicrous political symbolism—deploying the very despicable and authoritarian vigilante force whose actions touched off the whole DHS funding battle in the first place—it was also an operational nonstarter, since ICE agents aren’t even properly trained to perform their own jobs, let alone to take on the responsibilities of security screening at airports. So in addition to airports being overrun with irate passengers, they’ve also taken on legions of ICE workers standing around, looking like bored yet heavily armed hotel concierges.

Faced with this spiraling chaos, Senate Republicans took on the disorienting task of actually doing something. After weeks of rejecting viable plans to fund the TSA while tabling ICE’s budget, they abruptly reversed course and accepted the basic framework put forward by Democrats. GOP Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and John Kennedy of Louisiana—lawmakers who are pretty much the polar opposite of apostles of bipartisan moderation—sponsored a bill to continue funding the DHS, while arranging to move through the budget line for ICE on a separate reconciliation vote that would no longer have to meet the 60-vote threshold imposed by the filibuster. It was a partial capitulation to Democratic demands, sure, but it was also a way out of the GOP’s hilariously extended streak of rake-stepping on the issue. After the proposal won passage with the blessing of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the Senate not unreasonably adjourned for two weeks, figuring that at least one major headache for the GOP had been palliated. 

Cue the next executive branch power grab: Trump abruptly announced that he would bring TSA workers back on payroll, by simply redirecting ICE’s lavish budget line in last year’s tax-and-spending law into the airport-security arm of the DHS. This represented yet another completely illegal executive-branch end run around Congress’s fundamental spending authority—yet with Congress permanently asleep at the wheel, it scarcely seemed to matter. 

But all this maneuvering failed to account for a key factor: the bottomless stupidity of the House GOP conference. Notified of a provisional governing win out of the Senate. House Speaker Mike Johnson, the MAGA clown who couldn’t think straight, promptly and inaccurately disowned it as the handiwork of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. (In fairness, one probably can’t expect Johnson, who was a critical House strategist in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, to offer anything like a good-faith account of how the Senate works.) And since Johnson owes his House leadership perch to the most militant antigovernment wing of the chamber’s MAGAfied GOP majority, he appeased it with a meaningless new House measure to lock in eight weeks of DHS funding with the ICE budget at full strength. In other words, the House has met a prospective resolution of the DHS shutdown with the very same brand of legislative wishcasting that provoked the funding impasse in the first place. Then, naturally, Johnson gavelled his own chamber into a two-week recess of its own. 

It’s hard to imagine how one could draw up a more farcical parody of legislative governance. In a weird aberration, the Senate stumbled into acting as it was originally intended to—brokering a compromise deal on a key budgeting failure that was wreaking havoc with a basic mode of transportation and sparking public outrage. Yet a House that has made it a point of ideological pride to refrain from doing its job in any sphere proceeded to do something worse than nothing—it reinscribed the basic terms of the original failure for no discernible reason other than to dramatize its own contempt for governing. As Noah Berlatsky of Public Notice writes, the whole episode encloses on itself, origami-style, as a textbook illustration of MAGA incompetence: “Trump made sure all travelers knew he was responsible for airport delays by sending hated ICE agents to stare at them while they wait in line, then Senate Republicans publicly blamed Trump for scuppering a deal, then Trump (illegally) declared he could have funded TSA anytime he wanted, then Republicans in Congress had a massive internal fight which ended with them refusing to fund TSA and going on vacation.”

At the same time, the White House’s still greater self-inflicted calamity—the “excursion” into Iran—continues. The Pentagon is reportedly planning to deploy ground troops for an engagement projected to last at least several weeks. This move would represent a dire escalation of an already illegal and unauthorized war. . It’s the very sort of executive abuse that Congress is supposed to exercise fundamental oversight over. Yet a national legislature that can’t even govern its way out of airport delays isn’t about to reclaim its constitutional responsibilities in wartime. The scandal here isn’t so much that Congress is on recess at this parlous moment, but that, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, it’s no longer possible to tell the difference.