House Republicans and Senate Republicans can’t agree: should the Department of Homeland Security be funded through the end of this fiscal year if it means President Obama’s executive orders which mandate that prosecutorial discretion should be used when deciding which undocumented immigrants should be deported are left as policy?

The House says no; the Senate says yes. The Senate says “we’ll strip the repeal of his executive orders out of the DHS funding bill and put that language into a separate bill which we’ll debate next week, but for Heaven’s sake let’s get the money problem solved.” The House says “screw that. We don’t like that immigration policy and we won’t let it sit another day, even if it means the DHS shuts down.”

This was entirely predictable back in December when Congress passed legislation to fund every other federal department and agency but DHS, but somehow the Republican party leaders thought they could finesse the differences between the ultra-conservative loonies in the House and the pseudo-moderate members of the Senate. The House members are mortally afraid of being primaried for not being conservative enough, while the Senators worry about that too but also know that in statewide elections they have to tack toward the middle in order to keep their jobs.

Now the Democrats are sitting back and saying “pass the popcorn.” They don’t want DHS to go unfunded, but they can’t do anything to fix that until the majority party proves it can negotiate with itself.

Meanwhile we have terror threats against shopping malls, teenagers trying to fly to Syria to join ISIS, right-wingers declaring themselves “sovereign citizens” and guys wanting to assassinate the President. There’s certainly no shortage of things for the Homeland Security department’s 230,000 employees to do. The Republicans like to call themselves the national security party, but they’re proving to be anything but so far this Congressional term.