The clock is ticking down to midnight, and with each passing hour, the spectacle in Washington grows more shameful.
“The Department of Homeland Security is shut down, a third interruption in just a handful of months, but let us not pretend this is a stand for principle,” said Lisa McCormick. “This is just more political theater designed to let everyone in the capital go home for a week’s recess while pretending to fight.”
The truth of it is plain as day, says the progressive maverick who took on disgraced Senator Bob Menendez alone in 2018, and grabbed two of five votes in the Democratic primary.
McCormick is holding a ‘countdown to capitulation’ because the DHS shutdown has no impact on the most significant issue, the Gestapo-like agents terrorizing US cities and killing Americans who dare to photograph them in the act.
Children waiting for their school bus Thursday morning ran when they saw an ICE operation in a nearby apartment complex.
Read More: ICE operation near Lindenwold school bus stop sparks panic | https://nj1015.com/lindenwold-ice-operation-concerns/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral
The baseline funding for this vast department, which oversees everything from the airport security lines we stand in to the floodwaters rising in our towns, has expired. But the fight we were promised was supposed to be about something more than money.
It was supposed to be about reining in a federal immigration enforcement apparatus that has been operating as a gang of armed secret police agents with the terrifying impunity of a Gestapo.
The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, two American citizens shot dead by officers sworn to obey Donald Trump rather than the Constitution, demanded a reckoning.
Democrats went to the table with ten demands, simple things like body cameras so we can see the truth, and a prohibition on agents hiding behind masks like cowardly night riders.
And yet, here we are, watching long after that leverage evaporated.
The Republican majority in the Senate offered a short-term funding patch, a temporary bandage to let the bleeding continue while negotiations dragged on. The Democrats blocked it, as they should have.
But then came the grand finale. The White House floated a counteroffer so flimsy it was practically invisible, and the Democrats, led by the man from New York, rejected it as the half-measure it was.
But in the end, they did not force the issue. They did not hold the line. They allowed themselves to be outmaneuvered once again, handing the Republicans exactly what they wanted: a way to avoid good-faith negotiation while the Democrats took the blame for the ensuing mess.
This is a familiar song, and we have heard it before.
Spineless Senator Chuck Schumer rushed to approve five broader federal spending bills, throwing away the one piece of leverage that could have forced Republicans to negotiate. Schumer caved.
Last November, after a 40-day government shutdown, Schumer was so eager to flip the lights back on that he allowed ten members of his caucus to abandon the fight instead of protecting health insurance for millions of American families.
Last March, Schumer allowed the administration to continue dismantling the federal government without authority, to let unelected bureaucrats and, reportedly, figures like Elon Musk, have unfettered access to sensitive data while the nation’s secrets drifted out the door like smoke.
Now, the Department of Homeland Security shuttered its non-essential functions, but paramilitary Gestapo raids go on.
“Here is the bitter irony that should make every American’s blood boil,” said McCormick. “The immigration enforcement, the very engine of the abuse that sparked this fight, will grind on without missing a beat.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection are sitting on a mountain of cash, more than seventy billion dollars from the last Republican tax and spending bill.
The acting director of ICE openly admitted the shutdown might hamper their work on international crime, but when asked about the deportation forces and the armed agents on the street? Silence. Those operations will continue, unmonitored, unaccountable.
The traveling public will eventually feel the pinch, as TSA screeners, many still digging out from the financial hole of the last shutdown, will again be asked to work for promises instead of paychecks.
The Coast Guard will have to prioritize life-saving missions over inspections and training.
FEMA’s long-term recovery work will grind to a halt.
The armed agents, the ones whose conduct we sought to reform? They will keep patrolling, keep detaining, keep doing exactly as they please, because their funding was secured in a different deal that Democrats failed to stop.
So the countdown continues. The Democrats refused a blank check for chaos, they say.
By failing to cement reforms into law when they had the chance, and by allowing themselves to be herded into a corner while the real power, the real money, and the real authority to terrorize remain untouched, they have simply signed a different kind of check.
One that this nation, and the memory of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, will have to cash.