Primed For Failure

Steve Benen makes yet another important point about the sturm und drang concerning this weekend's terror attack and the warning the suspect's father gave U.S. officials.

We're dealing with a situation in which Abdulmutallab's father, justifiably concerned, felt like his son might become dangerous. He didn't have any information about a specific plot, but he wanted the authorities to be aware of the potential problem. U.S. officials added Abdulmutallab's name to a list -- a rather long list.

And therein lies the point. U.S. officials learn about all kinds of potentially dangerous people, all over the globe, every day. Most of these people have never committed an act of terrorism, and never will. A tiny fraction will consider violence, a tiny fraction of them will actually attempt mass murder. It's literally impossible to launch investigations into every one of them. It's not that officials "had real details about an Islamic maniac and did nothing about it"; it's that officials had vague details and lacked the capacity and wherewithal to take immediate action.

There's a lot of information out there, and results like this one are practically unavoidable. Blaming U.S. officials for not leaping to action in response to the father's concerns is a mistake.

It's worth exploring why this is the case, why the TSA doesn't have more funding to process more leads like this.

The answer is simple:  The Republican party.

As Republicans seek to put the blame for the widespread perception of ineptness at the Transportation Security Administration on the Obama administration, Democrats are arguing that Republican legislators bear part of the blame and that they're politically vulnerable on the subject.

Perhaps the largest impediment to change at the agency: South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint has a hold on the appointment of a TSA chief, over his concern that the new administration could allow security screeners to unionize.

Republicans have cast votes against the key TSA funding measure that the 2010 appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security contained, which included funding for the TSA, including for explosives detection systems and other aviation security measures. In the June 24 vote in the House, leading Republicans including John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Mike Pence and Paul Ryan voted against the bill, amid a procedural dispute over the appropriations process, a Democrat points out. A full 108 Republicans voted against the conference version, including Boehner, Hoekstra, Pence, Michelle Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Darrell Issa and Joe Wilson.

Republicans seem to think the TSA having funding is not worth it, and yet they complain the TSA dropped the ball on this issue.  Furthermore, they continue to have the TSA chief's nomination on hold.  Republicans complain incessantly about the government not functioning properly, when they refuse to take any responsibility and in fact actively move to stop it from functioning smoothly so that they can then blame the President when the government agency in question fails in some duty.

Amazing how that works.