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Joe Blows

Joe Lieberman had two major accomplishments as Senator. As the Senator from CIGNA, he refused to provide the 51st vote for the Affordable Care Act unless the idea of a public option was taken off the table. Much of the chaos Trump has been able to inject into health care depends on it being run exclusively through private companies.
The other was creating the Department of Homeland Security. Lieberman pushed this, in the wake of 9/11, to show that he too is concerned about turrurism. It always struck me as a name that the Nazis would have come up with. George Bush opposed it as adding an unnecessary bureaucratic layer but was pressured to sign it into law.
Lieberman's justification came from the 9/11 investigative committee's conclusion that al Qaeda was able to do what it did because of the failure of various Federal agencies to "connect the dots (and if I never hear that phrase again, it will be too soon)."
But the agencies primarily responsible for the wobbly dot connecting, the FBI and CIA, had enough bureaucratic power to avoid being put into DHS. So it became the Department of This and That, a bunch of random agencies thrown on a pile with little rhyme or reason.
This had negative consequences.
FEMA, for instance, was formerly a cabinet level agency with a seat on the National Security Council. Being demoted to Undersecretary within DHS caused it to receive just as much attention as the Secretary was willing to give it. Being headed by political sinecure Good Job Brownie, that was not very much and arguably led directly to the sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina.
The Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service were formerly independent agencies with narrowly defined jobs that they ran in a fairly professional way. Under DHS, they were merged into Customs and Border Protection, with a job exactly as big and a mandate exactly as fuzzy as the Secretary of DHS wanted to make it.
The Secretary is currently the Acting Secretary Chad Wolf. Since he has not been and will not be confirmed by the Senate, he is accountable to nobody other than Trump.
And so now here we are at Portland, with CBP turned into a private militia.
National security expert Fred Kaplan makes the case that DHS was a bad idea from the beginning (in fact, as he implies, not really and idea at all) and should be disbanded.
It is hard to argue with that. I can't think of anything good that Joe Lieberman ever did. He was propelled into office by William F. Buckley and the anti-Castro community, whose purpose was to dethrone liberal Lowell Weicker. His only accomplishments of note other than the above were crusading against video games and being the first Democrat to criticize Clinton when he was impeached. These accomplishments cemented his reputation forever as a sanctimonious prick.


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