HOORAY, Republicans Will End The DHS Shutdown! OH NO, Republicans Can't Agree On That After All!
GOP in disarray again.
Republican leaders in the House and Senate announced Wednesday that they’d broken the impasse over funding the Department of Homeland Security without any of the limits on ICE brutality that Democrats have held out for. The celebration lasted until Thursday morning, when the House convened for a ceremonial two minute session without taking any action on the bill the Senate sent it.
Maybe the House will take up the bill again Monday, or maybe Donald Trump will try ordering US allies in Europe and Japan to pay for ICE’s deportation operations, since that was such a big hit when he demanded the same for his war in Iran.
If nothing else, at least America got this compare-and-contrast diptych of headlines from the New York Times on Wednesday and then Thursday:
After we screencapped that wonderful pairing, the Times wussed out and revised the second part of the headline on the more recent story to the perhaps softer phrasing “House Punts on D.H.S. Spending, Extending Shutdown.” By later today, it may change yet again to “House Could End DHS Shutdown As Soon As Monday.”
Let’s sort through the wreckage like unpaid FAA crash site investigators and figure out what happened here. (Haha, we kid! FAA is part of the Department of Transportation, which is funded through the end of September!) As you may recall — it was a whole week ago, which in the Trump Time Distortion Matrix could be five minutes or several lifetimes — the Senate last Friday voted to fund all parts of the Department of Homeland Security except for ICE and the deporty parts of Customs and Border Protection. Democrats weren’t able to force through the restraints on ICE that they wanted, but Trump didn’t get either of the things he wanted: full funding for ICE, or his stupid voter suppression law.
Once it reached the House, though, the far-right crazies rejected the Senate bill, and instead passed an eight-week extension of full funding for DHS, including ICE, until May 22. Then both houses went on vacation, with zero chance that Senate Democrats would vote for the House bill.
The “breakthrough” Republicans announced Wednesday set the clock back to last Friday again, scuttling the House’s full extension of DHS funds and reviving the everything-but-ICE arrangement from last week. The only difference between last Friday and yesterday wasn’t in the bill at all, but in the White House, where Donald Trump agreed to let the all-but-ICE bill pass, to be followed at some later date by a GOP-only reconciliation bill to fund ICE for the rest of the fiscal year, if Republicans can get their shit together to pass it. Trump last week was insisting that wasn’t good enough, because he wants ethnic cleansing and rigged elections too. The racism ties the whole room together, man.
Everything went fine until the Senate’s second try at its all-but-ICE bill passed and went to the House this morning, where for some reason, Republicans did not take it up.
And then suddenly I was run over by Pam Bondi getting shitcanned, so we guess we’re writing that up for morning, who cares about being able to get through airport security now?
[CNBC / NPR / Politico / WaPo (gift link)]
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LOL, Dok is a treasure and the only person that can describe this shitstorm in a way that makes me laugh. I mean, I’m appalled at the dysfunction, but I’m laughing.
Again, their evil is only being blunted by their stunning incompetence.