WILL THE INSANE SHUTDOWN EVER END? It seems weird to say, but Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the Senate minority leader, appears to believe Democrats have honored the memory of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by withholding the pay of Transportation Security Administration workers at the nation’s airports for more than six weeks.
Good and Pretti were the protesters shot and killed by immigration enforcement officers as they attempted to obstruct operations during the widespread demonstrations against President Donald Trump’s deportation agenda in Minneapolis.
“In the wake of the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Senate Democrats were clear: no blank check for a lawless ICE and Border Patrol,” Schumer said on the Senate floor in the wee hours of last Friday morning. “Democrats held firm in our opposition that Donald Trump’s rogue and deadly militia should not get more funding without serious reforms, and we will continue to fight for those reforms. I’m very proud of our Democratic caucus. Through it all, Senate Democrats stood united — no wavering, no backing down. We held the line.”
By saying Democrats “stood united,” Schumer meant that his party steadfastly refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security unless the Trump administration agreed to Democratic demands to change the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates. The strange part of it was that by blocking funding for the department over their unhappiness with ICE, Democrats ended up cutting off funds for TSA airport security agents, who are also part of DHS.
The short version is that Schumer and his colleagues took aim at ICE and hit TSA. Some 50,000 TSA airport officials across the country found their paychecks stopped because Schumer was unhappy with another agency’s enforcement of federal immigration law.
The situation was stupid in many ways. First, the Trump administration actually agreed to some of the changes to ICE operations that Democrats demanded. Schumer and his colleagues could have taken the W and moved on, allowing TSA agents to be paid.
Second, significant parts of ICE’s enforcement operations — the officers who actually arrest illegal immigrants — were already funded through 2029 by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The part of ICE and Border Patrol that Democrats defunded by their protest was the ICE and Border Patrol civilian and professional support staff. Needless to say, they were not the ICE and Border Patrol agents on the streets of Minneapolis. Of course, TSA agents weren’t on the street in Minneapolis, either, and Democrats cut off their funding, too.
Third, the Democrats’ strategy was particularly cruel because the Homeland Security employees they defunded were still recovering from the six-week Democratic-led shutdown last fall. As Fox News’s Bill Melugin noted, “These civilian support staffers haven’t been paid for almost half of the last six months when you factor in the prior shutdown.”
And fourth, in an effort to escape the political blame for setting off huge lines at airports across the country, Democrats proposed to fund TSA agents while still not paying those long-suffering professional and civilian support staff at Homeland Security and Border Patrol. It’s like Schumer and his colleagues, upon discovering they were punishing the wrong people for perceived wrongs at ICE, proposed to keep punishing others who were also not responsible for perceived wrongs at ICE.
For their part, Republicans have made one big mistake in all this. That mistake was negotiating with Democrats.
In past shutdowns, the loser has been the party that attaches conditions to reopening the government. The winner is the party that says “No.” First, reopen the government, and then we’ll talk about your issue. That is always the position the public likes best. The Republicans surely know this, because they have been on the losing side of many shutdowns in the past.
Instead, in this situation, Republicans agreed to negotiate with Democrats. That led to a muddying of the basic facts of the situation. Instead of seeing Democrats shutting down TSA over an unrelated policy dispute, the public saw two sides bickering and unable to agree, which many voters attributed to business-as-usual politics. They blamed both parties when this was, in fact, a Democratic move to cause misery at the nation’s airports in hopes of pressuring the administration to back off its enforcement of federal immigration law.
So far, Democrats have not really paid a political price for what they have done. Given that, there appears to be no conventional way out of this problem. And that has given Trump an opening, who is now using his executive power to restart paychecks for TSA workers. Some Democrats are protesting and calling Trump’s action unconstitutional. But should Trump just do nothing?
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Remember, this is not only a terrible burden for TSA workers and their families and major inconvenience for millions of travelers. It is also a grave safety risk, given the current elevated danger of terrorism associated with the war in Iran. In recent weeks, there have been multiple killings around the country, seemingly committed by terrorists angry about the war.
As it goes on, Schumer is talking about the memory of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. There are now investigations underway into their deaths. But no matter what those investigations conclude, the violence in Minneapolis was not a legitimate cause for one party to lash out wildly, imposing punishment on, of all things, the nation’s air travelers and the people who keep the air system safe. What sense does that make?