Jeh Johnson, the man who ran the Department of Homeland Security under Barack Obama, went on "Fox & Friends" Thursday and told Congress to do its job. Fund DHS. End the shutdown. Stop playing games with national security.
It has now been more than a month since Democrats blocked a funding measure and left the Department of Homeland Security operating in limbo. Johnson, no ally of the current administration, made clear he thinks the standoff is indefensible.
"The most basic function of Congress is to keep the lights on and fund the government."
Hard to argue with that. And yet, Senate Democrats have managed to do exactly that for weeks on end.
The shutdown isn't about fiscal responsibility. It isn't about oversight. Democratic leaders are blocking the funding package because they want reforms to ICE and CBP. Plainly, they want to weaken immigration enforcement as a condition of keeping a cabinet department funded.
The White House offered several reforms. Democrats rejected them. The administration refused to meet their central demands, which amount to hamstringing the agencies responsible for securing the border and enforcing immigration law. Negotiations between the White House and Democratic leadership are now at a standstill, The Hill reports.
Sen. Patty Murray, Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told reporters after a meeting Thursday that the two sides remain "a long ways apart." Given what Democrats are demanding, that gap isn't surprising.
Only one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted for the funding package. Fetterman has said he will never support shutting down the government. That leaves him as an island of common sense in a caucus that has decided holding DHS hostage is sound strategy.
Johnson didn't just make a process argument. He pointed to something far more urgent.
"Let's not forget that we are now in a heightened threat environment because of the war against Iran, so if there was ever a time that we would need to fund the Department of Homeland Security, it's right now."
He also raised concerns about air travel safety and transportation security during the shutdown. These are not abstract worries. TSA officers, Coast Guard personnel, and cybersecurity teams all fall under DHS. A prolonged funding lapse doesn't just inconvenience bureaucrats. It degrades the country's ability to detect and respond to threats at a moment when the threat environment is actively escalating.
Johnson understands this because he ran the department. When a former Obama DHS secretary goes on Fox News to say the shutdown needs to end, the Democratic position has lost whatever thin justification it once claimed.
The deeper issue is what this standoff reveals about Democratic priorities. They are not objecting to waste, fraud, or mismanagement. They are objecting to the enforcement of immigration law. The entire shutdown exists because Democrats want to use the funding process to extract concessions that would limit ICE and CBP operations.
This is the same party that spent years insisting no one was in favor of "open borders." Now they are shutting down the department responsible for homeland security because the administration is enforcing the border too effectively. The contradiction speaks for itself.
Tom Homan, President Trump's border czar, met with centrist Democrats on Capitol Hill Thursday to continue discussions on the funding package. That outreach matters. It signals the administration is willing to talk while Democrats stonewall. The question is whether enough Senate Democrats will follow Fetterman's lead and put national security above the caucus line.
Johnson put the principle cleanly:
"We need to get out of the business of coupling policy disagreements in Congress with funding the government."
He's right. And the irony is that his own party is the one doing exactly what he condemns. Democrats have every right to oppose the administration's immigration policies through legislation, through oversight hearings, through the courts. What they don't have is a credible argument for defunding the department that protects the homeland because they dislike how effectively it's doing its job.
Every day this shutdown continues, the Democratic caucus owns the gap between their rhetoric about security and their willingness to undermine it. A former Obama cabinet official just told them as much on national television.
One Democrat has listened. The rest are still calculating.