House GOP concedes in DHS funding fight, reopening TSA but blocking ICE funds | Hacker News Reader

House GOP concedes in DHS funding fight, reopening TSA but blocking ICE funds

cnn.com

42 pointsCider99866 comments

And if you look very closely, you can see just the tiniest bit of backbone growing in the backs of the Democratic congresspeople. If they continue to nurture this growth, they may even be able to sit up straight. That would be a marked improvement over their current situation of lying on the floor and letting the GOP walk all over them.

Hopefully this time it lasts - over the past 10+ years I've witnessed them occasionally find it, only to lose it again relatively quickly. Now the stakes are too high to repeat this pattern.

It's better than caving, but it's the least conceivable quantum of backbone. We're talking Cambrian Explosion levels of backbone, and I expect any further growth will proceed at about the same pace.

Who would have thought that funding an organization whose members summarily execute American citizens and then get away with it would turn out to be unpopular?

While we certainly have a law and order problem with regards to illegal immigration, we also have a law and order problem with regards to people tasked with enforcing the law. And the latter is much more important to sort out first.

Politically, it's easier for people to get angry about long lines in airports than it is about people occasionally getting murdered.

If Republicans could have successfully pinned the blame for the shutdown on Democrats, they would have caved weeks ago. They couldn't, but not because people agreed with Democrats about ICE.

Rather, it's because they don't like it when politicians tie things together. Republicans looked as if they were punishing ordinary flyers to pursue an unrelated political battle. They'd rather they pass the TSA bill, then go back to fighting separately about ICE, even if they really want ICE as well.

I've got to wonder if the dynamic is something more like when the media focuses people on ICE, people fit enough of the ICE-propaganda in their head to assuage the cognitive dissonance about supporting an organization that summarily executes Americans. Whereas when the media focuses people on the TSA, that's a whole different set of TSA-propaganda to fit, supporting the idea that TSA itself is a worthy endeavor. But when the issues are tied together, people can't fit both sets of rationalizations in their heads at the same time, so interest in supporting ICE drops.

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