It Is Now Impossible for Us Republican Senators to Continue Quietly Drinking Sweet Tea while Children Are Caged

It’s getting to be that time, huh? We’ve held out about as long as we possibly could. Our party has continued to drink sweet tea while averting our collective gaze from the many children currently detained in government-sponsored prison camps. However, like all good things, our game of chicken with one of the more heinous acts of this administration must come to an end. As we’ve always said, we’ll only speak out against the imprisonment of children if the whole thing turns into a political crisis.

Well, that political crisis has arrived. It’s time to put the long, cool glass of sweet tea down, stand up from the wooden rocking chairs on our verandas, and do some very strained public hand-wringing while still continuing to support this administration’s entire agenda. Let’s all come together to do the absolute bare minimum in the face of unspeakable horror. Fellow GOP Senators, please join me in putting down our delicious teas and doing the very least we can do: tepidly speaking out against this reprehensible policy in a transparent attempt to save our own asses.

As a first step, we can all sign a gutless letter that doesn’t actually demand any concrete action. We don’t even need all of us to sign it, just a dozen or so. If all of us signed it, we’d be rocking the boat a bit too much and the boss wouldn’t like that. The point is, continuing to ignore the terrible stories coming from the U.S. border is simply no longer a political option for us.

However, taking a firm, united stance is also not an option. So, we’ll simply occupy the weird, murky middle ground where we pretend to care, but not too much. As much as we all enjoy rapidly changing the topic to sensible immigration reform anytime we’re asked about our country’s child prisons, the sun has temporarily set on that tactic. We must now denounce these child prisons in the vaguest of terms, so as not to alienate our unhinged base and president.