No surprise here. Most Americans think the Republicans who run Congress will be to blame if Congress doesn’t fund the Department of Homeland Security:
Republicans in Congress would shoulder the blame for a shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security if they are unable to enact a new spending bill to keep the agency running, according to a new CNN/ORC poll. The survey finds 53% of Americans would blame the Republicans in Congress if the department must shut down, while 30% would blame President Barack Obama. Another 13% say both deserve the blame.
If a spending bill is not passed by Feb. 28, the agency’s funding will run out.
A majority says a shutdown at DHS, even if it’s just for a few days, would be a crisis or a major problem.
Of course, Republican voters are absorbing some of the right-wing talking points, so their belief in the importance of funding the DHS is eroding relative to the rest of the population.
Republicans are less likely to see a shutdown as a big problem, 46% say so compared with 66% among Democrats. Among all adults, slightly fewer see a DHS shutdown as a problem or crisis than said so in November when asked about a possible shutdown of the whole government, 55% now vs. 59% in that poll.
This is almost amusing when you consider the wingnut’s outrage du jour. This would be the appearance that Deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf made on Hardball with Chris Matthews last night in which she tried to tamp down Matthews’ lust for ISIS blood:
MATTHEWS: Are we killing enough of them?
HARF: We’re killing a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians. They’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether…
MATTHEWS: We’re not going to be able to stop that in our lifetime or fifty lifetimes. There’s always going to be poor people. There’s always going to be poor muslims, and as long as there are poor Muslims, the trumpet’s blowing and they’ll join. We can’t stop that, can we?
HARF: We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people…
A typical response to this comes from a diarist at Red State:
On the killing side, the near term problem is that we aren’t killing enough. She is quite wrong that “we cannot kill our way out of this war.” The administration is choosing not to try to do so, but every single time it has been tried “killing your way out of a war” has worked. The big brains in the White House are enamored drone attacks and tightly controlled airstrikes. These can kill a small number of people and knock off selected leaders. This is only effective so far as it goes. It means that ISIS command and control facilities are co-mingled with civilian targets and ISIS leaders know where to go to be safe. Our attacks are terrorizing ISIS fighters and aren’t discouraging others from joining them. Far from “killing a lot of them” we are only scratching the surface.
Unless these folks happen to be planning to travel abroad, the only way these ISIS fighters are going to harm them is if they get past our domestic defenses, which means that they ought to be very concerned that our Coast Guard, customs, immigration and counterterrorism officials have the funding they need to operate. But they’re the Americans least likely to see this as a serious threat because they’re just playing at partisan politics. If they were really afraid, they’d be bellowing at John Boehner to stop dicking around with our security. Or, in some cases, they’re just too stupid to understand that two plus two equals four.
The excuse to give Joe Lieberman a committee chair has imploded. Ceasing to be an independent agency directly interacting with the White House has impair FEMA’s response to two major hurricanes. The close integration of homeland security planning, military surplusing, and training by Israeli consultants has caused the abuses of the Constitution in suppression of Occupy and the #blacklivesmatter protests through coordinating repressive police responses and propaganda cover. The TSA is a disaster and a boondoggle. Customs and immigration is so busy building and expanding the Great Wall of Amexica that they likely cannot focus on the unlikely prospect that terrorists will slip through the US-Mexican border.
The DHS has provided a false sense of security that has made the US drop diplomacy almost all together and even that isn’t enough for the chest-beaters who are the same ones shuttering the agency, if only temporarily.
The fact is that GOP (and a lot of Democratic) appeals to national security and homeland security are a sham designed to scare people into tolerating the diversion of their taxes to total surveillance and corporate boondoggles.
Hopefully the green eyeshades crowd at DHS have enough understanding of what is actually meaningful protective acts of the homeland to squirrel away the little cash that it would take to keep them going until Congress comes to its senses. If not, maybe they can borrow a little from the bloated defense and intelligence establishment.
At some point, the public does need to come to the awareness that being the most expensive national security and homeland security apparatus in the world does not necessarily give you magical unlimited powers to be a bully.
The House GOP thinks they can make everything stick to President Obama just because they used that tactic to win a historical mid-term election. Well, welcome to history, Speaker Boehner. It only allows you to make your own reality in certain restricted circumstances.
The fact that they are not really afraid means that the President can cut some fat in DHS. He could start by RIFfing abusive TSA managers and officers and not replacing them. And by bringing all of DHS into line of actually honoring the US Bill of Rights.
I’m very surprised that Boehner has not yet hit rock bottom in his delusions that he can hold the GOP together.
Are there any legs to the idea of breaking up DHS and returning the departments to normal government? That’s a smaller-government money-saving move I could live with.
I believe there are no legs.
Oh well.
Unfortunately, grift from national security/homeland security is bipartisan. No legs at all. Which is the anvil that the GOP thought they could hammer against by making a scary move.
What is with the 47%?
Heh. 47% appears to be the new 27%.
They are probably Republicans.
Voters being what they are, they’ll absolve the Democrats, and vote for the Republicans.
If anyone even remembers the next shutdown by election day 2016, it will be laid at the feet of Democrats once Fox and the Both-Siders get done with the issue.
It might be interesting sometime if one of the media millionaires, while interviewing yet another Republican, would ask a rather obvious question: If the Department of Homeland Security is such a vital cog in our governmental machine, why are you shutting it down just to make your political point? Can’t Congress simply pass a law in the House and the Senate overruling the President’s executive order? Why get the issue tangled up in the funding for such a crucial agency? Or is our nation’s security nothing more than a legislative bargaining chip for your party?
I won’t hold my breath waiting for that question to be asked.