Bill Barr Learns The Hard Way There’s No Executive Privilege At Airport Security

If there’s one thing a partial government shutdown is good for, it’s reminding powerful people that the systems they hollowed out eventually come for them too.

And so it was at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport today, where a familiar face was spotted doing something deeply unglamorous: waiting. For hours. In a TSA line that snaked across terminals, doubled back on itself, and seemed less like airport security and more like a theme park ride designed by Kafka.

Yes, that’s former Attorney General Bill Barr, standing in the same 3+ hour security line as everyone else. Turns out there’s no fast pass for former architects of executive overreach. Just shoes off, laptop out, and the slow march of indignity.

Across the country, TSA lines have ballooned into absurdity as the partial government shutdown drags on. But the wait at IAH is particularly bad. A staggering 36% of TSA workers there reportedly called out today — a not-at-all surprising development given that “working without pay” is simply unsustainable. And the president’s decision to deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers is *not* helping the problem.

And let’s be clear about how we got here, because there’s been a predictable attempt to muddy the waters. Republicans own this mess. Full stop. They’re the ones who empowered Trump’s personal police force — ICE — whose abuses helped trigger the standoff that led to this shutdown. They’re also the ones refusing to take up multiple Democratic proposals that would fund TSA and alleviate exactly this kind of crisis. The dysfunction isn’t some abstract inevitability; it’s a policy choice.

Which brings us back to Barr.

Sure, on one level, there’s something almost charming about the idea that former Trump officials are “just like us,” stuck inching forward in a security line, silently calculating whether they’ll miss their flight. But of all the people now trapped in these interminable lines, Barr is uniquely positioned to appreciate the consequences of governance by grievance and power grabs. This is, after all, a man who spent his tenure bending the Justice Department toward presidential whims and helping normalize the erosion of institutional guardrails. The rule of law didn’t just fray on its own, it was actively worked over by people like him.

It’s like they say, sympathy is in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].