Make This One for Jesus — TSA Workers Will Be Fine, Probably

There was a deal on the table yesterday.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune — a Republican, Trump’s own Senate majority leader — walked a bipartisan compromise to the president on Sunday. Fund everything in the Department of Homeland Security except ICE. Handle ICE separately through reconciliation, where Republicans can pass it with 51 votes and Democrats can’t touch it. Get the airports running. Get the TSA agents paid. Both sides had agreed. White House aides had blessed the idea before it got to Trump. Thune told the president directly: Democrats will take this.

Hair Führer said no.

Then he went to a podium.

Standing in front of Republican senators today, Trump told them not to go home for Easter recess until they passed his agenda. “You don’t have to take a fast vote,” he said. “Don’t worry about Easter, going home. In fact, make this one for Jesus. Okay, make this one for Jesus.”

The TSA agents eating from food drives at Denver International did not get a shoutout.

The 400-plus workers who have quit since the shutdown began on Valentine’s Day were not mentioned. Not the officer in Texas still paying off loans from last fall’s 43-day shutdown while taking out new ones for this one. Not the 58-year-old father of three facing eviction. Not the workers who cannot afford copayments for cancer treatments or doctor visits for their sick children. Not the people who have spent nearly half of the past 170 days working without paychecks because they are classified as essential, which means they cannot stop showing up. They just stop getting paid.

Jesus, apparently, has a position on the SAVE Act.

Because that is what Metamucillini wants in exchange for ending this. Not a clean DHS funding bill. Not the bipartisan agreement his own aides helped design and his own majority leader carried to his door. He went to Truth Social and declared he would not make any deal with Democrats “unless, and until” they vote to pass the SAVE America Act — his voter suppression omnibus. The one that bans mail-in voting, requires documentary proof of citizenship to register, mandates all-paper ballots, and expands criminal liability for election workers. The one that has nothing to do with airport security. The one he called, in writing, “far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate.”

More important than the workers. More important than the airports. More important than the deal. More important, apparently, than Easter itself — though Jesus is invited to weigh in on the vote count.

Let’s be precise about what the SAVE Act actually does, since Trump is now invoking the divine in its defense. It requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote — a requirement that would affect an estimated 21 million Americans without easy access to a passport or birth certificate. It bans mail-in voting with limited exceptions, eliminating the ballot of virtually every military family stationed overseas, every elderly voter in a county without a drop box, every disabled American without a viable alternative. It expands criminal penalties for election workers who count ballots that don’t meet its requirements. It is not election security. It is voter suppression in a flag-print suit, and Donald Trump just told the country it is worth more to him than 50,000 federal paychecks.

He said it from a podium. While invoking Jesus Christ.

ICE agents, for the record, are being paid. Trump’s reconciliation bill funded them. ICE is fine. The people screening your luggage and your shoes and your children at the airport checkpoint are eating donated granola bars and missing rent. Callout rates at Houston Hobby hit 51 percent on a single day this month. JFK was nearly 30. The CEOs of American, Delta, Southwest, United, and JetBlue sent a joint letter to Congress calling it simply unacceptable. But ICE is fine, the SAVE Act is sacred, and Jesus has been conscripted into the cause.

This is not a both-sides funding dispute. One man killed a bipartisan deal, stood at a podium, and told senators to stay through Easter to pass a voter suppression bill instead. That man is the President of the United States.

Now you know.