If you’re stressed out at work this week, console yourself that you’re handling it a bit better than Justice Department attorney Julie Le, who told a Minnesota federal judge yesterday she’s been so overwhelmed by the immigration-related habeas corpus motions assigned to her that she’d like to be held in contempt just so she could get some sleep. “The system sucks,” she said, according to local news. “This job sucks.” That’s something we can all agree on. Happy Wednesday.

Time to Play Hardball

by Andrew Egger

All last year, conventional wisdom among the Democratic base was that the party’s political leaders are feckless cardboard cutouts unable to mount an effective opposition to Donald Trump’s authoritarian advance.

But as congressional Democrats navigate a spending fight over the Department of Homeland Security this week, the end result is shaping up to be just the opposite—even if the naysaying has persisted. The fight is going about as well as anyone could have hoped.

Yesterday, the House passed a spending bill reopening the government after a few days of partial shutdown. The bill funds the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, State, and Treasury until this fall. The Department of Homeland Security, however, is funded only for an additional two weeks under the package.

To some progressives, even this is an intolerable concession. Speaking ahead of the vote, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) summed up the line of thought: “Not only should ICE receive NO funding, it should be abolished.”

Should ICE be abolished? That’s a policy fight Democrats will get to have among themselves if they’re lucky enough to win unified control of government in the next few years. But the idea that it is an achievable policy aim in the immediate term is a fantasy. Shutting down the government for enormous periods of time might be good for raising public awareness of a given issue, but it doesn’t magically create consensus for your view. Democrats’ shutdown play last year couldn’t even squeeze Republicans into reinstating a status-quo Obamacare subsidy; the idea that they’d have better luck vaporizing ICE is ridiculous. The cherry on top is that even shutting down the government indefinitely wouldn’t starve ICE of funds, given the gobs of cash already appropriated for the agency by last year’s Big Beautiful Bill.

But Democrats do have an advantage they never had with the subsidy ...