Shut it down!
It took not one but two killings of unarmed white American citizens by immigration enforcement agents for the Democrats to commit to withholding funds from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency of which Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the border patrol – the killers – are part.
After the first killing, seven House Democrats nevertheless voted with Republicans to allocate $64.4 billion to the DHS, including $10bn for ICE. The bill they approved contained none of their party’s “commonsense” reforms, such as prohibition of masks and the requirement that agents obtain a judicial warrant before busting down a person’s door – not just an administrative warrant signed by the same agency invading the home. This last “reform”, which the Republican party rejected, is the soul of the fourth amendment, without which no one is safe anywhere from the state’s intrusion.
After the second killing, these congressmembers hustled to cover their butts. “I failed to view the DHS funding vote as a referendum on the illegal and immoral conduct of ICE in Minneapolis,” the New York representative Tom Suozzi said in a statement. He promised to do better next time. The Texas representative Vicente Gonzalez explained, with equal credibility, that his yes vote “was not to fund ICE”, but “to ensure that our agencies here in south Texas were funded.” Would those agencies include the border patrol? He didn’t say.
Several of the shamefaced seven said they had to fund the government, no matter how morally corrupt, because a government shutdown would be worse.
With the bill under Senate consideration, a partial shutdown now appears likely, with the Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, vowing that his caucus will reject any funding bill that includes money for DHS without key restrictions. What’s more, snow and ice covering half the states may prevent House members from returning to Washington to revote on an amended package should the Senate manage to pass one. Congress has until Friday night to get it done.
Which raises the question: how bad would a government shutdown be? Put another way, is the federal government we have more harmful than no government at all?
The answer is yes.
It’s been noted that a shutdown would not slow ICE down; it has a big slush fund to tide it over. But the answer is still yes, for two reasons.
First, aside from sending heavily armed thugs into the streets, courts, hospitals and schools, the government we have does little for the public good and much to its detriment.
Its so-called “department of government efficiency” has fired 300,000 civil servants and reduced every benign function of government to penury and ineffectuality – with no real reduction in spending or improvement in efficiency.
It has used the remaining social benefits, from food stamps to Fema, as instruments of extortion and punishment, selectively against blue states and institutions it perceives to be hostile to the president’s agenda.
It has looted the treasury for date-night plane rides, extravagant office renovations, hundreds of prosecutions against the president’s personal enemies, and fat contracts and other indulgences handed out in return for generosity and fealty to the crown. It is working on sinking the mighty US economy.
Let us not forget, moreover, what else Congress is voting to bankroll. There’s the Pentagon’s $839bn budget, $33.8m of which is disappearing daily into US operations in Venezuela; Health and Human Services, led by a maniac apparently bent on bringing back preventable fatal childhood diseases; and Labor, which is among agencies that have posted tropes associated with white supremacists online and whose National Labor Relations Board, after a year idled by the lack of a quorum, is now fully staffed and primed to roll back all the gains unions have made since the New Deal. Et cetera.
Reason No 2 was best expressed 250 years ago, in the Declaration of Independence:
[The king] has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has “protect[ed] them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States”.
The Trump administration is waging war against its own citizens. It is no longer leading a legitimate government of, for, or by the people.
Unlike such “commonsense” reforms as not nullifying the fourth amendment, the Congressional Progressive caucus is pressing the Democrats to demand “real reforms” of ICE and the border patrol, whose personnel and functions are now virtually indistinguishable. The caucus’s demands include the feds’ withdrawal from Minneapolis and all other cities, now or in the future, and an end to mass arrests and arrest quotas.
But the party’s base – and Americans in general – have already decided that these agencies are irredeemable. A YouGov poll conducted on 24 January, the day Pretti died, found that more voters support than oppose abolishing the agency. The abolitionists include three quarters of Democrats and nearly half of independents; among Democrats only 15% oppose the agency’s elimination. Even 19% of Republicans want ICE melted, up from 9% in June.
And this shutdown would be about more than ICE.
A budget is the quantitative expression of priorities. A shutdown – the refusal to approve a budget – is the rejection of those priorities, and a chance for the minority party to showcase its own. This is no ordinary shutdown, however. The terms are not just X dollars for this or Y dollars for that, even when X is something as critical as affordable healthcare or as deadly as ICE.
Nor is this just a fight between Democrats and Republicans. The left has already positioned it inside a bigger struggle. The consensus on abolishing ICE is the product of thousands of cellphone videos documenting the crimes of the government – the result of grassroots activism getting those videographers to those crimes. Grassroots activism is responsible for the House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries’ threat to impeach the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, if Trump doesn’t fire her. Schumer barely moves unless he gets a million angry calls and emails.
Astonishingly, protest has even moved homeland security to pull the border patrol’s Bovino from Minneapolis and send him back to California, though anyone who thinks his replacement, the “border czar”, Tom Homan, is any less of a fascist is deluded.
Economic slowdown should accompany a shutdown; Minnesota’s magnificent general strike shows it can be done. Might the step after that be mass tax resistance?
The question has been framed in the streets: is a government that impoverishes healthcare and nutrition, flouts the law, enriches its officials, imprisons babies, and kills its citizens worth the money it collects, much less the respect and obedience it demands?
Democrats have nothing to lose by shutting down the government to force the majority party to respond to these questions and the one that looms over all: what, if any, is the political and moral future of the US?
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist and frequent contributor to the Guardian. Her Substack is Today in Fascism
