Since Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has embraced camera-ready tactics and performative politics to an almost cartoonish degree, few were surprised when she started airing taxpayer-financed ads earlier this year, starring the South Dakota Republican and thanking Donald Trump for his administration’s anti-immigration crackdown.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced a sequel of sorts: The new video — also paid for with American tax dollars and also featuring Noem in a starring role — was designed to run in domestic airports. But instead of focusing on immigration, this clip blames congressional Democrats for the ongoing government shutdown.
Almost immediately, the DHS secretary confronted a problem she should’ve seen coming: Airport administrators said they wouldn’t show Noem’s partisan video to air travelers. The list of airports refusing to go along with the Republican’s plan continues to grow. The Associated Press reported:
Airports big and small around the country are refusing to play a video with a message from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in which she blames Democrats for the federal government shutdown and its impacts on Transportation Security Administration operations. Airports in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Phoenix, Seattle and more say the video’s political content goes against their policies or regulations prohibiting political messaging in their facilities.
In fact, there are dozens of airports of various sizes in the state of New York, and according to Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, Noem’s video has been “banned” from all of them.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, this week demanded an investigation into Noem’s use of public resources to create and promote a partisan video.
In a letter to acting special counsel Jamieson Greer, Cantwell wrote, “When viewed in its totality, Secretary Noem’s video can only be reasonably interpreted as a partisan message intended to misleadingly malign the Trump Administration’s political opponents, convince Americans to blame ‘Democrats in Congress’ for the ongoing government shutdown, and influence their future votes — all while omitting the fact that Republicans currently control the White House, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House of Representatives.”
It’s easy to imagine a hypothetical video in which a homeland security secretary offers the public worthwhile information about how the shutdown might affect air travelers. That sort of message might actually help the public at a difficult time. But Noem apparently didn’t want that. Rather, she used taxpayer money to make what amounts to a propagandistic attack ad — that a growing number of airports are rejecting anyway. The Office of Special Counsel, which is an independent watchdog agency responsible for investigating ethical lapses like these, has not yet said whether it will examine the DHS video. Watch this space. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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