"We, the minority of the people:" The Democrats and the DHS

The seal of the Department of Homeland security, a department in danger of 
being shut down by Senate Democrats, who plan to blame the shutdown on the
Senate Republicans.

The Department of Homeland Security, or the DHS, the department formed after 9/11 to keep us safe from terrorists abroad and at home, a department with over 200,000 employees, may be closed down in less then two weeks, because the Democrats just can't make a deal.

In 2013, the Democrats were the majority in the senate. And they wanted to pass President Obama’s nominees. But they could not, due to a one sticky little rule called the “nuclear option” which allowed senators from the minority Republicans, such as Rand Paul, is his long talk about drones, to filibuster, or talk a nomination to death, without it ever coming up for a vote.

So the head of Senate Democrats, Harry Reid, after that embarrassing moment with Senator Paul, simply had the rules changed. Now he only needed a majority of senators to pass the nomination, which he had, instead of the 60 he would have needed to keep Paul from talking, which he did not have.

Now, the Republicans are in the place the Democrats were back then. They are the majority in the senate,  which they have been for less than ten weeks. When they came in they promised that they would not be shutting down the government, as it was in 2013, causing massive anger across the country. Alright, so the Democrats are determined to do it for them. And though they can't shut down the whole government, they are going after one massive cabinet level department.

The Department of Homeland Security has to be funded, or it will have to shut down, and on the 27^th of this month, that funding ends. They will run out of money. Now there is a bill before the senate that could fix this, and quite nicely too, but Democrats do not like it.

Harry Reid, Minority Leader of the Senate Democrats

For you see, the president signed an executive action not that long ago giving deferments to the deportation of around five million undocumented-immigrants, and the “DHS Bill” would not only fund the Department of Home Land Security, it would also attack the president’s immigration action, starting the deportations up again.

As a response, the Democrats are going to go Rand Paul all over the bill, and are planning to talk it to death if it comes up-and here’s the catch, after Democrats say they will talk the bill to death-or if they can’t, the president will veto it-they will then blame Republicans for the shutdown. The people behind that line of reasoning must have missed eighth grade logic.

Rand Paul in his filibuster gave a stirring attack of the president's drone policy until he finally got what he wanted, assurance that the president would not kill Americans because he did not like them. Paul's filibuster was in danger of blocking one nominee for a little while, the Democrats are in danger of closing the doors of America's defense against terrorism.

When the Democrats were in control, they changed the rules of nominees, making it much, much easier for them to pass their agenda. But with the Republicans in control of the senate, and even with Republicans from the House of Representatives telling them they should change the rules, with the support of senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, Republicans in the senate will not change the rules just because they can.

When the Republicans were the minority, even though the Democrats would bring nothing up for a vote, and even though the Democrats changed the rules to help themselves, and even though the Democrats had less votes on amendments in the whole last congress then in the first few weeks of this one, they called the Republicans obstructionists, saying they-the ones without all of the power- were not getting anything done.

Now the Republicans are the majority, voted there by the “we the people,” the Democrats somehow take their own loss at the polls in the midterm elections as a mandate from the nation telling them to keep pushing their agenda,  especially on immigration, even though many even question its constitutionality.

The Republicans had the rules changed on them when they were the minority, and they were blamed for being the bad guys, and they won’t even play the Democrats back at their game now, and change the rules, and they are still the bad guys.

So Homeland Security may go unfunded, America may go unprotected, and the Democrats who are doing this may claim it is the Republicans fault, all because they think that “we, the minority of the people, should still be in control, even when we lose.”

Andrew C. Abbott