Bipartisan leaders of the House and Senate have formally invited King Charles III to address a joint meeting of Congress on April 28, 2026. The invitation, confirmed by reporter Jake Sherman on April 1, arrives while the Department of Homeland Security has been shut down for 46 days, hundreds of TSA agents have quit their jobs, and Congress is on a two-week vacation, which shows no urgency to cut short.
The priorities here are not subtle.
Whatever your feelings about the Special Relationship, the optics of congressional leaders coordinating a royal address while refusing to return to Washington to fund the agency responsible for airport security and border enforcement tell you everything about where their attention is. They found bipartisan agreement on one thing: the pomp.
The partial DHS shutdown began on Feb. 14. Congress left town for a two-week vacation and is not expected to return until April 13. That means lawmakers will have been gone for roughly half the shutdown's duration before they so much as sit back down at their desks.
According to The Daily Caller, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that President Donald Trump called on Congress to end their vacation and reconvene to reopen DHS. Trump has not waited for them to act. On Friday, he signed an executive order mandating that TSA agents be paid while the shutdown continued. He also deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to major airports to assist TSA agents, a direct operational response to the hemorrhaging of airport security personnel.
Hundreds of TSA agents have quit since the shutdown began. That is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It is a security gap at every major airport in the country, and the White House moved to address it while Congress drafted stationery for Buckingham Palace.
The reason DHS remains shuttered is not a mystery. Senate Democrats issued a list of demands on immigration reforms as their price for reopening the department. Among those demands: prohibiting ICE agents from racial profiling and wearing masks.
Consider what that means in practice. Democrats are holding airport security funding hostage to impose restrictions on immigration enforcement officers. TSA agents are walking off the job, travelers are facing mounting disruptions, and the Democratic caucus wants to negotiate the dress code of ICE agents before they'll vote to turn the lights back on.
This is not governing. It is leveraging a crisis they are sustaining in order to extract concessions on an unrelated policy fight they have been losing. The shutdown is not an accident; Democrats are trying to solve it. It is a pressure campaign they are choosing to maintain.
The invitation letter to King Charles leans heavily on the history between the two nations. It references Queen Elizabeth II's 1991 address to Congress, invoking her words about a shared "spirit of democracy" and "a commitment to the fundamental values of individual freedom, consent of the governed, and the rule of law."
Fine words. But the rule of law includes funding the agencies that enforce it. Individual freedom includes the freedom to board a plane without wondering whether the skeleton crew running your security checkpoint got a paycheck this month.
There is nothing wrong with inviting a foreign head of state to address Congress. The U.S.-U.K. alliance is real and worth honoring. But the bipartisan enthusiasm for scheduling a ceremonial event while the same leaders cannot muster the bipartisan will to end a shutdown affecting millions of Americans reveals a Congress that is fundamentally unserious about its responsibilities.
They can coordinate across party lines to plan a joint session. They can agree on a date, draft a letter, and handle the logistics of hosting a king. They cannot, apparently, agree to fund the department that secures the homeland.
Congress returns, presumably, on April 13. King Charles addresses the body on April 28. If the shutdown persists until then, members of Congress will sit in the chamber applauding a foreign monarch while the department charged with protecting American borders and airports remains unfunded. The TSA agents still on the job will be working under an executive order because their own legislature couldn't be bothered.
Trump has done what the executive branch can do: ordered pay for the agents still working, surged ICE personnel to fill the gaps, and publicly demanded Congress come back. The ball is where it has been for 46 days. On Capitol Hill, where the lights are off but the invitations are going out.
