Hours-long lines stretched through numerous US airports in major cities on Monday, a product of an impasse in Washington DC over homeland security reforms, immigration enforcement and voting rights.
Congress has yet to pass a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security for this fiscal year. Democrats blocked funding the department, demanding that ICE agents be held accountable for acts of violence in the course of their enforcement operations, including the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Democrats have also demanded policy reforms, including an end to masked operations and warrantless entry of buildings. Republicans voted against legislation that would have funded the salaries of TSA agents and the US Coast Guard while leaving other parts of the department shut down.
Many TSA security screeners have refused to work while unpaid.
Meanwhile, the US Senate has been debating the merits of the Save America act, which would impose changes to voter registration rules on states that its opponents – including all Senate Democrats at the moment – say would infringe on the right to vote for many Americans. The bill does not have enough support to overcome a Democratic filibuster. Nonetheless, debate stretched through the weekend.
Donald Trump has threatened to refuse to sign any legislation that passes until the Save America act passes.
“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,’” the US president wrote on Sunday in a Truth Social post. Trump is demanding an end to the filibuster, if necessary to pass the bill.
Why are airport security lines so long?
TSA agents have now been without pay for two weeks. According to TSA Career, the average TSA officer’s salary is between $46,000 and $55,000 with locality adjustments. Some have taken on other work temporarily, and others will not show up to work without being paid, believing that the inconvenience inflicted by their absence is necessary to resolve the congressional argument.
TSA sets a target of 300 passengers per lane, per hour. An airport like Hartsfield Jackson in Atlanta serves about 275,000 passengers a day, with more than 300,000 passengers in peak travel hours. That would require at least 100 screeners between its domestic and international terminals to serve customers within an hour. If two-thirds of screeners are absent, the wait time triples, as we saw on Monday at 9 am, with three hour-plus screening lines.
Can’t Congress just end the shutdown and fix the problem?
Yes, Congress could pass a new budget bill that would end the DHS shutdown and TSA workers would once again receive paychecks, likely solving the problem (although hundreds of TSA agents have reportedly quit during this now more than six week-long partial shutdown).
What is Trump demanding?
Trump continues to make the Save America act his top legislative priority. On Monday morning, he rejected any effort to compromise with Democrats over funding for DHS that would alleviate long lines at airport security checkpoints, saying Republicans should focus on passing the Save America act instead.
“It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate,” Trump wrote.
What is the current status of the Save Act?
After an unusual weekend spent working, the Senate has made negligible progress on passing the Save America act, despite continued pressure from Trump and his rightwing allies.
The major problem facing the legislation, which would tighten requirements for people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a photo ID at polling places, is that it does not have the support needed to pass. Democrats have no intention of backing the legislation, which requires 60 votes to overcome the Senate’s filibuster. Republicans control only 53 seats in the chamber, making the minority party’s opposition the biggest challenge the bill faces.
Have Trump’s demands motivated Republicans to get this bill passed?
The GOP doesn’t appear particularly well organized around the bill, at least at the moment. The sole vote on the measure taken over the weekend was an amendment proposed by Tommy Tuberville, a Republican senator, to insert language prohibiting transgender athletes from girl’s sports, but that failed along party lines. The culprit may be attendance – 10 senators missed the vote, four of whom were Republicans. Fellow Republican Eric Schmitt has also introduced an amendment to include provisions banning mail-in voting and gender-affirming care for minors, but that has not yet received a vote.
Approving any of these amendments may complicate things further for Republicans. Any changes to the bill that the Senate makes would have to be approved by the House of Representatives, which the GOP controls by what is at this point a margin of just one vote. There’s no telling if some of the far-right provisions that Senate Republicans want to add will be palatable to that chamber’s moderates ahead of the November midterm elections.
But we may never find out the answer to that question, because there’s no viable path for the Senate to approve the bill anyway.
