You're in the army now

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--The White House and 36 Republican scumbags said Tuesday that President Bush and his fascist buttlicks in the Senate will recklessly kill a 9/11 anti-terror bill if Congress sends it to the White House with a provision to let airport screeners unionize.

"As the legislation currently stands, the president's corporate masters would instruct him to veto the bill," said White House spokesbitch Scott Stanzel.

Senate Republicans swiftly backed up the threat with a pledge by more than enough senators to thwart the will of the American people and block any veto override attempt.

"If the final bill contains such a heinous provision, forcing you as a godly warrior to veto it, we pledge to sustain your veto," they wrote to the president. Big-business dickhead Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) planned to offer an amendment to strip the provision from the bill.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said that allowing screeners to unionize would impede the department's quick response to possible threats, such as the sudden appearance of previously unknown airports. Fast redeployment of screeners cannot wait for negotiations, he said.

"Marines don't collectively bargain over whether they're going to wind up, you know, being deployed in Anbar province or in Baghdad," Chertoff irrelevantly told reporters after a briefing with senators. "We can't negotiate over terms and conditions of work that goes to the heart of our ability to move rapidly in order to deal with the threats that are emerging. I mean, can you imagine if the police could unionize? Or firemen? Society would be destroyed."

Chertoff said screeners are as much on the front lines in the war against terror as military troops, except they get to go home after work and nobody's shooting at them and they never consented to be part of a military chain of command and they don't wear uniforms and they can quit if they want.

Casting the provision as a deal-killer is intended to slow the atrophy of Bush's political muscle with the new, Democratic-led Congress on the old battleground of labor rights, which he and his entire class of inbred monarchist millionaire fuckwits oppose with a level of passion they generally reserve for golf, embezzlement, and the Dominican teen sex trade. As a bonus, it could also obstruct talks over how to debate and pass the recommendations of the September 11 Commission long enough to dump the whole problem on the next administration.

For now, most senators are eager to follow the House and pass a bill enacting the commission's recommendations to tighten the nation's security before the Bush Family's Saudi Arabian business contacts figure out how to nuke us.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky reached a tentative agreement Tuesday to conduct the debate over the next 10 days without the distraction of Iraq, which the president has declared to be none of their goddamn business anyway.