“Hardline House GOP conservatives aren’t worried about a looming Department of Homeland Security shutdown,” reports Cristina Marcos at The Hill. They’d rather let DHS’s funding lapse than give up a provision in its new appropriation reversing president Barack Obama’s recent executive orders on immigration.

Is it just me, or does this sound more like the promise of ice cream and fireworks than the threat of a spanking? I usually can’t think of anything good to say about Congress, let alone its big-spending, war-mongering, Taliban-on-the-Potomac “conservative Republican” contingent, but this is one of those rare exceptions.

The only “security” DHS provides is job security for parasites. Sporting an annual price tag of  more than $60 billion, Jeh Johnson’s executive branch fiefdom boasts the fiscal responsibility of a methamphetamine addict, the manners of your local Department of Motor Vehicles, and the same level of respect for privacy as East Germany’s Stasi.  It deserves to be shut down. Completely, not partially. Permanently, not just until the politicians come up with a compromise.

And we get a twofer out of this standoff as well. Not only are we at least temporarily and partially shed of the DHS bureaucracy burden, but Obama’s tentative baby steps toward lightening up on America’s half-century of draconian immigration policy remain intact. If the Know-Nothing right won’t get over its fear that somewhere, someone is crossing an imaginary line to earn a living without their permission, it’s nice to limit their ability to inflict that fear on the rest of us.

Things could be a lot better, of course. In a perfect world, Congress would disband itself, padlock the Capitol, head out into the real world seeking real jobs, and drag the rest of the Washington political machine (including the White House and the Department of Homeland Security) kicking and screaming behind it. That would save the rest of us an annual cost of trillions of dollars in taxes and debt, months of unnecessary labor implementing their control fetishes, and untold hours of worrying about what criminal schemes they might get up to next.

But I’ll take what I can get, at least for the moment. I can’t help but be reminded of the old folk tale (popularized by Joel Chandler Harris in his “Uncle Remus” stories) of Br’er Fox, Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch. Please, please, please, Br’er Conservatives, whatever you do, don’t throw us in there! (wink)