Outside the Beltway

Comments

1. DK says:
   Friday, 27 March 2026 at 04:59

   Trump says he’ll sign order directing DHS to pay TSA workers as shutdown drags on (ABC News)

   So Republicans were wrong claiming the president could not pay TSA, as his critics said all along?

   DHS shutdown breakthrough comes at cost for Republicans as funding fights nears end (Fox News)

   Congress is one step closer to ending the Homeland Security shutdown after the Senate advanced a new, last-minute deal, but it came at the price of Republicans ceding ground, temporarily, to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

   …It was an agreement that largely gave Schumer and Senate Democrats what they wanted — no funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and parts of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). But it lacked the stringent reforms they desired, like requiring judicial warrants or requiring agents to unmask.

   Senate agrees to end shutdown for most of DHS (Politico)

   Senate Republicans accepted what Democrats have been offering for weeks — cash for all of DHS except for ICE and part of Customs and Border Protection.

   The Senate approved the funding package by a voice vote and is now expected to begin a scheduled two-week recess. The House could vote as soon as Friday…

   Republicans could’ve accepted this earlier, pre travel chaos.

   Reply

   1
2. Scott says:
   Friday, 27 March 2026 at 06:54

   Summary of the world today courtesy of Heather Cox Richardson:

   In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Singapore’s minister for foreign affairs, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, put in bald language the change in the world order instigated by President Donald J. Trump.

   “For 80 years,” Balakrishnan explained, “the US was the underwriter for a system of globalisation based on UN Charter principles, multilateralism, territorial integrity, sovereign equality.” That system “heralded an unprecedented and unique period of global prosperity and peace. Of course there were exceptions. And of course, the Cold War was still in effect for at least half of the last 80 years. But generally, for those of us who were non-communists, who ran open economies, who provided first world infrastructure, together with a hardworking disciplined people, we had unprecedented opportunities.

   “The story of Singapore, with a per capita GDP of 500 US dollars in 1965. Now, [it is] somewhere between 80,000 to 90,000 US dollars. It would not have happened if it had not been for this unprecedented period, basically Pax Americana and then turbocharged by the reform and opening of China for decades. It has been unprecedented. It has been great for many of us. In fact, I will say, for all of us, if you look back 80 years.

   “But now, whether you like it or not, objectively, this period has ended…. Basically, the underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor. But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.”

   In its place, as scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder said to me in a YouTube conversation yesterday, Trump is aligning himself with international oligarchs like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), and China’s Xi Jinping. Because of his position as the president of the United States of America, this means he is aligning the United States of America with this oligarchical axis as well, abandoning the country’s democratic principles and traditional allies.

   Reply

   2
3. Scott says:
   Friday, 27 March 2026 at 07:10

   The Military and the Border:

   A War Zone, Minus the War: One Year Later, Has the Military Really Secured the US-Mexico Border?

   An investigation into how President Trump’s emergency declaration expanded military power, blurred legal lines, and helped spread the use of military-grade technology

   t’s been a year since President Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border, but amid far-flung domestic deployments, dozens of deadly Caribbean boat strikes, and now a war in Iran, the U.S.-Mexico border has in many ways become a forgotten emergency—a military buildup that persists, as others have before it, long after public attention has turned elsewhere.

   Trump campaigned on the southern border, painting a picture of a region overrun with violent criminals. On Inauguration Day in January 2025, he declared the magnitude of the crisis required a military response. The resulting deployment—more than 20,000 troops in the past year from the most expensive fighting machine on the planet—has no end in sight.

   “Our job, our role here on the border, is to gain full operational control,” said Lt. Col. Max Ferguson, who directed Joint Task Force Southern Border’s operations through September of last year. “Detect, respond, interdict, and ensure that nobody is doing illegal crossings from south to north into the United States.”

   So have they?

   “Today, the number of illegals crossing into our country is zero,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in December, holding up his hand to make a “0” during a speech laying out the national defense strategy.

   His math was off by thousands.

   This February, the government recorded 9,621 encounters with people illegally crossing the southern border—an average of more than 300 a day. That’s still a 90% decline since President Biden’s last full month in office. But it’s about the same as it was in February 2025, the first full month after Trump’s inauguration—and has not changed dramatically in the months before or after the military deployment reached full capacity over the summer.

   …

   In the last 14 months, the administration has:

   • transformed more than 40% of the border from public land into no-trespassing military zones, with new additions as recently as February;

   • expanded an invisible surveillance network that monitors the wilderness and border communities, and ramped up the Department of Defense’s sharing of military-grade equipment and technology with U.S. Customs and Border Protection;

   • begun installing the first stretch of hundreds of miles of sensor-enabled orange buoys, each nearly five feet in diameter, to create a barrier dividing Texas’ Rio Grande;

   • quadrupled the number of troops while freeing up federal border agents to shift their focus to America’s cities as the battle over what Trump has called the “invasion” moved to Los Angeles, then D.C., then Chicago, and Minneapolis.

   Reply

Speak Your Mind