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The Bottomless Stupidity of House Republicans

Somehow, they’ve managed to top themselves in the crisis over TSA funding. Who knew that was even possible?

Mike Johnson holds a press conference in the US Capitol on March 27, 2026.

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 feckless legislative self-owns that have produced the present 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,........

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