The Secret Service hearings last week — not the fact that they were held, but the terrified tone of the questioning — got me thinking about how members of Congress seem to spend a lot more time shouting about how scared they are of stuff than they do actually trying to address the things that scare them. So I wrote a piece recounting a few of Congress’s recent panic attacks and put it up over at Medium:
In truth, fear-mongering is just about the only thing that our national legislators do well these days, now that they’ve stopped trying to pass legislation, and consequently they do a lot of it. Before the Secret Service became the scandal of the hour, the object of Congress’s night terrors was Our Porous Southern Border, which is in imminent danger of being overrun by ISIS, or Ebola, or both, probably. Trent Franks (R-AZ) warned in mid-September:
It is true, that we know that ISIS is present in Ciudad Juarez or they were within the last few weeks, so there’s no question that they have designs on trying to come into Arizona. The comment that I’ve made is that if unaccompanied minors can cross the border then certainly trained terrorists probably can to. It is something that is real.
Where did Franks learn this shocking and alarming news? Based on what he told Politifact, it was from “a report circulating around the Internet.” That report comes from right-wing “watchdog” group Judicial Watch, whose founder, Larry Klayman, once sued his own mother and wants to have President Obama deported. So, and this is just my opinion, but Franks might want to get at least one other source for his “ISIS wading across Rio Grande” story to have any legs.
There’s much more like that, including a few things from my favorite Senator in the whole wide world.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 