Americans’ Miserable Airline Experience is Absolutely Because of Democrats

 The pain is the point when it comes the Democrats’ most recent government shutdown. 

William Sullivan | March 26, 2026

There are reports saying that Elon Musk is offering to pay TSA employees’ salaries to help ease the financial pain of the government shutdown that is seriously impacting the Department of Homeland Security. 

Regardless how much money the man has, this is an incredibly altruistic gesture. 

Now, you can certainly count me among those who believe that the TSA is one of many government agencies which should have never existed at all.  But, given that it does exist, and that often good and dedicated human beings enter contracts with the federal government with the promise of income for their labor, it would be decent to want them to be paid for what they do when they go to work.  And, arguably, the fact that these agents typically earn less than the national average income means that they cannot afford these kinds of prolonged disruptions in their pay.

Additionally, given that the government has promised this service to the American people in exchange for taxpayers’ dollars, there is no downside to a private citizen ensuring that the job is done when the government has failed, right?  Paying his fair share, and all that?

Nevertheless, we are left wondering to what lengths Democrats will go in order to prevent Elon Musk from doing this. 

After all, the pain is the point when it comes the Democrats’ most recent government shutdown.  Democrats want Americans to be miserable, and want them to associate their misery with the Trump presidency and Republicans. There is no other conclusion that makes any sense.

They want Americans to think otherwise, of course.  They’re out there with the scripted attacks, suggesting that they’re ready to fund the government, including the TSA – with the caveat that the Republicans submit to their demands to carve out constitutionally legislated funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. 

Interestingly, this is a page out of Republicans’ playbook, to some extent.  Ted Cruz tried something similar in 2013.

If you recall, the passage of Obamacare in 2010 was an underhandedly partisan event.  There was little debate (we had to pass the bill to find out what was in it, Nancy Pelosi demanded), not a single Republican voted for it, and several Democrats were bribed with taxpayer money (i.e., the Cornhusker Kickback with Ben Nelson in Nebraska, the Louisiana Purchase with Mary Landrieu, etc.) for their support.  This was so unpopular, in fact, that 2010 was an absolute bloodbath for Democrats in the midterms, with Democrats losing 63 seats and control of the House, along with over 700 seats in state legislatures.

And though they lost 6 seats in the Senate, the majority in the upper chamber still belonged to Democrats in 2013, and Republicans were still dealing from a position of weakness.  Nevertheless, Ted Cruz led a charge in the Senate to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obamacare.

He wanted to fund the government, Cruz insisted – but with the caveat that Democrats submit to the demand to defund Obamacare. 

Democrats howled that Republicans were betraying the American people by shutting down the government while trying to reverse the funding that was mandated by constitutional legislation.  Yet today, they feign ignorance as to why critics suggest that Democrats are shutting down the government by doing the same thing.

In the end, it didn’t matter much for Cruz and the Republicans, though.  The government was shut down for 16 days in late 2013, and it really didn’t impact Americans in any significant way.  That shutdown was so broadly imperceptible, in fact, that President Obama famously used the opportunity to shut down open air National Parks to remind Americans of what Republicans were doing.  By the following summer, a massive influx of illegal aliens led to everyone completely forgetting about Ted Cruz’s stunt, and Republicans took the Senate in 2014, followed by Trump’s victory in 2016. 

Democrats may not be so lucky.  They are betting that they can pull off a Hail Mary strategy that relies heavily upon the ignorance and stupidity of millions of Americans.  And sadly, there are some signs that it’s working.

Just the other day, my wife was speaking with our elderly neighbor about the TSA trouble at the airports, who insisted that “those Republicans are really digging in their heels” when it comes to the government shutdown. 

It defies all logic to reach this conclusion, but Democrats may have some reason to think that their actively making Americans miserable (while falsely suggesting that Republicans are responsible for the misery) will work.  After all, the strategy arguably worked in 2020. Democrats around the country enacted liberty-strangling and soul-sapping lockdown policies and promoted race riots that certainly made Americans miserable, but they ran a campaign designed to convince Americans that all of it was a symptom of Trump’s America and Republican governance. 

Time will tell if the strategy will work this time around, but there are signs that Democrats may be in for a rude surprise.  You see, the gambit for Cruz in 2013 was entirely dependent on Americans disliking Obamacare so much that they would accept a government shutdown which had modest impact upon the American people.  Democrats’ strategy today is dependent upon Americans disliking ICE so much that they will accept a shutdown that is severely impacting millions of lives.

Democrats may be correctly reading the signs that Americans are not thrilled about ICE lately.  The agency suffers a dismal 38% approval rating, and maybe that’s why Democrats feel that using ICE as leverage in the absence of power will bear fruit.  The problem, as Ben Shapiro says, is that Democrats are less popular than ICE, with just a 30% approval rating. 

And now, in a masterstroke of political maneuvering, ICE agents are being deployed by President Trump and Tom Homan to support the TSA until the shutdown can be resolved.

Between Elon Musk offering to pay TSA salaries and ICE supporting staff to reduce Americans’ misery in TSA screening lines, coupled with the obvious fact that intransigent Democrats are the root cause of the fiasco at American airports, logic suggests that Democrats won’t come out of this government shutdown debate smelling like roses.

Image: Screenshot from LiveNOW from FOX video, via YouTube

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