It’s time for Democrats to join Republicans in voting to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Saturday evening’s display of courage, professionalism, and competence by members of the United States Secret Service – in which agents swiftly interposed themselves between the principals it was their responsibility to protect and an unknown threat, and then rapidly removed those principals to safety before many guests in the ballroom at the White House Correspondents Association dinner even knew there was a threat – makes it clear: under fire, the men and women tasked with protecting our senior government officials do their jobs extraordinarily well.
We expect these Secret Service agents to be willing to “take a bullet” to safeguard their assigned protectee. That they are willing to do so – and that their agency is able regularly and on an ongoing basis to recruit new men and women for the task, given its potential to be life-threatening – says something remarkable about the esteem in which the men and women who take on these responsibilities are held, and about the desirability of being considered worthy to join the agency’s ranks.
These men and women of the Secret Service should not be pawns in a political power struggle. They should not have to concern themselves with spending time in their precious off-duty hours figuring out whether or not their commitment to serve their country can afford to accommodate the uncertainty of their funding.
Yet for more than 10 weeks these brave men and women of the Secret Service have paid the price of congressional Democrats’ refusal to stand up to the radical leftists who dominate their party’s grassroots base – all because the Secret Service is part of DHS, which also houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and because the Secret Service is funded by the same annual appropriations bill that funds ICE and CBP, and Democrats are determined not to fund ICE and CBP, lest they offend the radical base that demands defunding all law enforcement authorities and lose the base’s engagement and turnout in the upcoming midterm elections.
As someone who has advocated for Congress to use its power of the purse – including, at times, advocating for government shutdowns to make political points – I can be intellectually honest enough to acknowledge the messaging benefit of a shutdown: there is no denying it can grab the body politic’s attention to make a point to the American people about how important you think an issue is.
That said, I have never advocated for unlimited, endless, never-ending shutdowns.
When many of us advocated for a shutdown in 2013 rather than provide funding to implement Obamacare, we knew that Republicans would bring the shutdown to an end if the Democrats were unwilling to negotiate, and we knew we would have to make our case to the American people in elections, working to persuade more people to our side.
By contrast, the Democrats who now refuse to vote to fund DHS, or even to allow the bill to come to the floor of the Senate so that it can be funded by the votes of others, do not care about making their case against DHS funding electorally. They are not denying the agency funding to draw attention to a political issue, they are denying funding to the agency because they want to eliminate it. They want what they want, and they want it right now, and the consequences be damned.
In making their demands, of course, these Democrats are denying the will of the people, who voted in the last election for President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress.
President Trump, you will recall, was the candidate whose campaign platform included a demand for a secure border and a call for the mass deportation of millions of illegal aliens – the exact agenda that was being carried out by the federal authorities at ICE and CBP, and which so upset the Democrats’ radical leftist base that congressional Democrats concluded they must refuse to fund DHS.
The Democrats in both the House and the Senate need to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security this week. The country is waiting.
Jenny Beth Martin is Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.