The bill adopting key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission had just passed the House. Rushing to the floor, Speaker Nancy Pelosi uttered a brief platitude about bipartisanship, then promptly claimed the bill’s passage was due solely to the fact that Democrats had “taken power … doing in six months what the three previous Congresses could not do in nearly six years.”

It was a new high (or low) in using homeland security for political grandstanding. And since then, Congress has had a hard time treating the issue as anything more than a partisan volley ball.