“After weeks of rejecting viable plans to fund the TSA while tabling ICE’s budget, [House Republicans] abruptly reversed course and accepted the basic framework put forward by Democrats. GOP Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and John Kennedy of Louisiana — lawmakers who are pretty much the polar opposite of apostles of bipartisan moderation — sponsored a bill to continue funding the DHS, while arranging to move through the budget line for ICE on a separate reconciliation vote that would no longer have to meet the 60-vote threshold imposed by the filibuster,” wrote The Nation’s Chris Lehmann, a contributing editor, on Monday. “It was a partial capitulation to Democratic demands, sure, but it was also a way out of the GOP’s hilariously extended streak of rake-stepping on the issue. After the proposal won passage with the blessing of Senate majority leader John Thune, the Senate not unreasonably adjourned for two weeks, figuring that at least one major headache for the GOP had been palliated.”

"Trump abruptly announced that he would bring TSA workers back on payroll, by simply redirecting ICE’s lavish budget line in last year’s tax-and-spending law into the airport-security arm of the DHS. This represented yet another completely illegal executive-branch end run around Congress’s fundamental spending authority — yet with Congress permanently asleep at the wheel, it scarcely seemed to matter.” In response to this, the House Republicans with “bottomless stupidity” tried to claim Trump’s plan had been crafted by a Democrat, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, then attempted to spin his way out of the resulting PR chaos."

“In other words, the House has met a prospective resolution of the DHS shutdown with the very same brand of legislative wishcasting that provoked the funding impasse in the first place,” Lehmann wrote. “Then, naturally, Johnson gaveled his own chamber into a two-week recess of its own.”

“It’s hard to imagine how one could draw up a more farcical parody of legislative governance. In a weird aberration, the Senate stumbled into acting as it was originally intended to — brokering a compromise deal on a key budgeting failure that was wreaking havoc with a basic mode of transportation and sparking public outrage. Yet a House that has made it a point of ideological pride to refrain from doing its job in any sphere proceeded to do something worse than nothing — it reinscribed the basic terms of the original failure for no discernible reason other than to dramatize its own contempt for governing.”

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.