In the latest episode of Washington’s favorite long-running sitcom, 'How to Accomplish Nothing While Looking Very Busy,' Representative Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) has stepped onto the stage with a new bill designed to ‘cripple’ the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to detain or monitor immigrants. It is a masterful stroke of performative legislative vandalism, the kind of high-minded gesture that looks fantastic on a donor’s Instagram feed but possesses the survival instincts of a chocolate teapot in a furnace. To the uninitiated, this might look like a bold stand for human rights. To the rest of us, who have been forced to witness the recursive loops of American political theater, it is simply another day in the asylum where the inmates are trying to rewrite the fire safety codes using only finger paint.

Let us dissect the target: the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS is a bloated, multi-headed hydra of bureaucratic incompetence, a post-9/11 artifact that exists primarily to justify its own astronomical budget and to make travelers take their shoes off in public. It is a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from twenty-two different agencies, none of which particularly like each other, and all of which share a singular talent for turning tax dollars into pure, unadulterated frustration. Ramirez’s plan is to financially starve this beast specifically in its capacity to hold or watch people. It is a classic move from the progressive playbook: if you don’t like how a massive, entrenched government entity is doing its job, simply cut the power lines and hope the resulting darkness somehow produces a utopia. It is the political equivalent of trying to fix a malfunctioning jet engine by throwing a handful of gravel into the intake mid-flight.

Of course, the Right will respond with their usual choreographed hysterics. Within the hour, the airwaves will be thick with the shrieks of professional alarmists claiming that Ramirez is personally escorting 'hordes' across the Rio Grande with a welcome basket and a complimentary voter registration card. To the Republican establishment, the DHS is a sacred cow—not because it actually secures anything, but because it provides a convenient, taxpayer-funded stage for their favorite brand of security theater. They love the optics of detention centers almost as much as the Left loves the optics of protesting them. Neither side actually wants a functioning immigration system; that would be a catastrophe for fundraising. If the problem were solved, what would they scream about during the midterms? The actual mechanics of governance are far too boring to solicit clicks or checks.

Ramirez’s bill aims to dismantle the infrastructure of detention and monitoring, which includes the increasingly popular 'Alternatives to Detention'—those lovely digital shackles we call ankle monitors. The irony is delicious. The Left spent years decrying physical cages, only to find that the high-tech surveillance state their own policies often encourage is just as intrusive, only with better battery life. Now, the goal is to remove those too. One must wonder what the endgame is. In the mind of the performative legislator, perhaps we can replace the entire system with a series of polite 'save the date' cards for court hearings that occur four years in the future. It is a philosophy of governance based entirely on the assumption that everyone will play nice if we just stop being so mean. It is adorable, in a deeply tragic, end-of-empire sort of way.

The bill will, of course, die. It will be smothered in a committee room that smells of mahogany and institutional decay, or it will be used as a convenient floor mat for the next round of budget negotiations. It doesn’t matter. The point isn’t to pass the law; the point is to signal to the base that one is 'fighting.' We live in an era where the 'fight' is the product, and the 'result' is an unwanted byproduct that rarely occurs. Ramirez gets to be the hero of the progressive fringe, the GOP gets to be the defenders of the 'homeland,' and the DHS continues its slow, expensive crawl toward total obsolescence while the actual human beings caught in the middle remain exactly where they were: pawns in a game played by people who couldn't find the border on a map if their next re-election depended on it.

Ultimately, this legislative stunt is a perfect microcosm of our collective stupidity. We are a nation that can no longer build, fix, or even properly fund its own institutions, so we settle for trying to break them in ways that make our respective tribes cheer. We are governed by people who think that 'crippling' a department is a substitute for reforming a system. It is the intellectual equivalent of a toddler knocking over a block tower because they don't know how to build a bridge. We are watching the slow-motion collapse of a civilization that has forgotten that reality doesn't care about your ideological purity or your well-crafted press releases. The DHS will keep spending, the borders will remain a chaotic mess, and we will all continue to pay for the privilege of watching this tedious, expensive, and utterly pointless show.