Congress Broke TSA, Then Left Town. TMZ Got the Receipts

TMZ crowdsourced photos of senators fleeing D.C. while TSA agents went unpaid and airports descended into chaos.

While TSA agents went unpaid and airport lines stretched for hours, senators were quietly slipping out of Washington for spring break, and TMZ caught them in the act.

TMZ put out a call for citizen journalists to send in photos of members of congress leaving DC for spring break amidst the longest TSA shutdown in history. And the people have delivered.

They caught Sen. John Thune on his way out at Reagan Airport in D.C., crossing his fingers a resolution to fund TSA passes the House. Spoiler alert: It didn’t.

Senator Marsha Blackburn got caught booking it out of D.C. The night before the Senate even voted on the bill.

And, obviously, Senator Ted Cruz had his email set to “OOO” well before the House even took up the vote.

Can you imagine being the unpaid TSA agent forced to go through Ted Cruz’s carry on as he stands there barefoot, hoping he’ll make his flight to Cancun on time? We all know he loves a trip to Mexico in the midst of a crisis.

How is it that TMZ is one of the only remaining mainstream media outlets with any integrity?

On the one hand, you have Bari Weiss gutting CBS News and turning it into a mouthpiece for the state. The same CBS News whose legacy includes Edward R. Murrow’s historic reporting live from the bombing of London during WWII. Then you have TMZ out here holding our elected officials to account. This is the same TMZ whose legacy includes photos of Britney Spears shaving her head and attacking an SUV at a gas station. How the tables have turned.

These Senators, who probably refused to make eye contact with the TSA agents they’ve nearly bankrupted, seem to feel like it was enough to get the funding bill out of their chamber and hope for the best when it went to the House. As if there was any chance Mike Johnson would get it over the finish line. Which, he didn’t. Surprise, surprise.

So now we have Trump swooping in, claiming to save the day with an executive order to fund TSA and resolve a crisis he caused. Long story short, he is paying TSA agents from the existing DHS budget, which begs the question: If he had this authority, why did he wait until right now to use it? Why did he allow Americans to spend weeks contending with hours long lines at airports? Why did he allow Americans to miss their flights? Why did he voluntarily subject Americans to chaos if a solution was available to him all along?

These are all rhetorical questions, because we already know that Trump had solutions right in front of him. Besides just funding TSA himself, which apparently he always had the ability to do, he was also given a plan that both Democrats and Republicans had reportedly agreed to.

According to Senator Thune, we could have had TSA paid by the end of the week. But the president said “no deal.” Trump explained: “Any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it.”

I explained this in more detail yesterday. Trump has tied this DHS funding bill to passing the SAVE America Act, which guts voting rights, forces states to hand over voter rolls to DHS, and makes it extremely difficult for millions of Americans to vote. All of which is because Trump knows he and the Republicans are facing a brutal midterm season as voters turn on them for any number of things making life difficult: Gas prices, a war no one wanted, horrific immigration raids, sky rocketing health insurance costs, and now, a nightmare at the airports.

All of which is a mess of Trump’s own making.

So if you see something, say something, and send a photo of your representatives to TMZ. They deserve to be shamed.