Guest View: Another terrifying near-shutdown

In Washington, D.C., it’s legal now to donate one ounce of pot to your favorite congressman. But anti-Latino-immigrant Tea Partiers’ threats to hold hostage our terrorism-fighting Department of Homeland Security show that legal recreational pot hasn’t mellowed out those Tea-Partying congressmen.
Because at midnight Friday, Congress’s Tea Party (“TP”) came within minutes of shutting down a lot of a department that’s vital to America’s national security. That’s something the TP Sons of the Confederacy’s not-so-great, we-repeat-not-so-great-granddaddies couldn’t do when they started our bloodiest war: America’s Not-So-Civil War.
Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke before Congress on Tuesday about our countries’ security. What must Netanyahu have privately thought of those TP yahoos? Maybe “Those nice Tea Partiers postponed cutting off Homeland Security’s money one week. Till March 6, the anniversary of The Alamo. Just so I would have a safe flight!” The TP must have found Netanyahu’s speech very moving. Because then a whole 30 percent of Republican House members voted, along with every single Democrat, to fund Homeland Security after all.
In February 2014, during one of many terrifyingly-expensive TP government shutdown-threats, we wrote that Bill Murray, everybody’s favorite movie TV weatherman, would probably sigh, “Same old Groundhog. Different Day.” Or, as baseball guru Yogi Berra once famously observed: “It’s “déjà vu all over again.” Just as sure as President Clinton never inhaled and George W. Bush never exhaled.
This time, the TP has “only” been holding-hostage President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The umpteen departments Bush’s Grand Old Party (GOP) said we needed to lump together because they’re so crucial to our war against terrorism. The TP is handcuffing Obama’s DHS “to make an anti-immigrant statement.” Though Obama deports 400,000 immigrants a year.
Tons more than other presidents. Check your Guinness Book of World Records. But Obama started immigration reform three out of four voters say we urgently need. Reform that House Tea Partiers from districts drawn up so Latinos are “scarce as hens’ teeth” have been stonewalling, like their iconic Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson.
But the TP’s Grand Old Party—getting older and less grand by the minute—can’t redraw U.S. senators’ state lines to ghetto-ize/barrio-ize Latino voters. The Senate sent the House a good, bipartisan immigration reform bill. Over 500 days ago.
Tea Partiers claim Obama’s prosecutorial-discretion-priorities unfairly favor Made-in-the-USA “Dreamers” over, oh, gang-bangers and drug cartel kingpins. And favor hard-working American citizen-wannabes who love America and their American-citizen/legal-resident families they’ve lived with here for many years. And who would like to “come out of the shadows” as witnesses to violent crime.
Tonight, picture Salinas’ fine TV station’s news intro’s bustling lettuce field abandoned. Because, as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican Governor’s Association keep asking, who else will do that back-breaking stoop labor?
That stooping aggravates our child-labor campesino-backs’ lumbago. Just from watching somebody else do all that stooping.
That 500-day-old bipartisan Senate bill handed this tough-but-fair immigration reform formula off to Do-Nothing House Tea Partiers: pass criminal background checks. Learn English.
Pay hefty fines. Pay back taxes, if any. (After all, even that ex-FBI agent GOP congressman who just had to resign did that, as another condition of his federal felony plea deal.)
And survive a strict 13-count ’em-13-year probation. But House TP-GOP congressmen won’t carry that bipartisan Senate bill.
They’re too tied-up, tying-up the House floor, making fiery “Remember the Alamo!” speeches. Like Steven King.
Yes, Steven King, The Master of Horror.
No, not Stephen King, the writer. Steven King, the right-wing congressman, The Master of Horror.
“Remember the Alamo!” speeches ring out from the Senate floor, too. From Texas Sen. John Cornyn, trying to out-Cruz Texas’s Cuban-fathered, Canadian-born, but anti-Latino-immigrant Tea Party Senator “my-name’s-Rafael-but-Ted-sounds-less-Latino” Cruz.
Pre-Civil War 1836 Texas was, like California, part of slavery-banning Mexico. On anniversaries of El Alamo, Cornyn tearily recites rebellious Southern slave-owner/illegal immigrant William Travis’s letter. About being surrounded by angry, well-armed and highly motivated Mexicans.
But isn’t it “unclear on the concept” when anti-Latino Tea Partiers handcuff the border patrol, the immigration law-enforcing ICE, and even the poor Coast Guard with no paychecks? And handcuff our state and local law enforcement authorities, who need grant money, training and federal immigration enforcement coordination Tea Party funding-shutdowns freeze-up?
Unclear on the concept: the TP funding-freeze freezes law-abiding-employer-wannabes’ immigration-status “e-verify.” And freezes cleaning-up the scandal-ridden Secret Service.
Remember that machete-wielding maniac almost sprinting into the Obama kids’ White House bedrooms? That drone crashing on the White House lawn?
And those drunken, orgiastic Secret Service road trips rivaled 2011’s scandalous Tea Party Animal House Freshman Congressmen-Gone-Wild, $20,000-a-head-special-interest-group-financed Holy Land road trip. When Tea-Partying Congressmen celebrated their economy stunting “budget sequester” victory by miraculously changing pricey wine into a hell of a lot of water. And by synchronized-swim-team-skinny-dipping in the sacred Sea of Galilee.
Yes, Yogi, the latest “Tea-Partying-like-it’s-1779” threatened government shutdown is “déjà vu all over again.” But what’s so funny about this latest TP terrorism-encouraging funny business?
If you ask us, it’s downright terrifying.
Karen and Tom Lantz are longtime Guest View contributors.