America cannot function with travelers stuck in security lines for three and four hours, as was reportedly the case Monday at several major U.S. airports, compounding the weekend problems and snarling the travel of business travelers and spring breakers alike.

Transportation Security Administration employees cannot be expected to go weeks or months without paychecks they need to pay their bills. And Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have a job to do other than looking inside travelers’ bags and checking identification, tasks for which they are not directly trained, especially in an era of heightened security alerts.

Simply put, Americans have the right to expect their government to take care of these things.

Also, airlines such as Chicago-based United Airlines, which recently told us of the challenges of dealing with the war in the Middle East and ballooning fuel prices, have the right to expect governmental involvement in their heavily regulated industry not to actively work against them.

United and its peer airlines cannot do profitable or even sustainable business if a large portion of their passengers are stuck in line when they should be boarding their aircraft or now are far more likely to cancel future trips due to worries about delays. And when transportation snarls, that means any business that needs somebody to be somewhere at a particular time feels an immediate impact.

Travelers need predictability. Even if there is only a chance of hourslong delays at some airports, people with essential trips feel like they can’t take the risk and thus they arrive hours early, sometimes making the delays even worse, especially in the early morning.

Those essential trips also include people headed to bedsides or funerals. And while President Donald Trump, who unconscionably cheered the death of Robert Mueller, the former FBI director, apparently thinks that angry vengefulness must continue beyond the grave, the vast majority of Americans believe otherwise. You could find very few people willing to affirm Trump’s statement about Mueller, even among the die-hards of his own movement.

All of this was compounded Sunday night at New York’s LaGuardia Airport when a commuter jet had a collision with a fire truck, killing the two Canadian pilots of the aircraft and injuring many of the plane’s passengers. That looked to be wholly unrelated to the TSA funding issues and will need an investigation to be fully understood. But the subsequent closure of the airport through Monday morning only compounded delay problems in the nation’s largest city, leading to a sense that America’s world-beating system of secure airports and stellar air traffic control was under so much stress that it might break. And that means safety could be compromised. Unacceptable.

For all of the above reasons, Democrats and Republicans have to compromise and make a deal.

We’ve said time and again, and will say again, that ICE agents should not be wearing masks; should state their names when asked; should focus on violent criminals; should not pursue their quarry inside schools, churches or day care centers; and should seek judicial warrants as a matter of routine before entering homes or businesses.

Republicans should agree immediately to those conditions, and then Democrats should immediately release the funding they’ve held up. As long as the president is not involved, there is reportedly some movement toward bipartisan agreement on those issues; Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said, “You’ve got people standing in lines at the airports. This needs to be fixed.”

Ya think? The chaos at our airports demands that such a movement from people of goodwill pick up speed.

Some savvy Republicans have figured out that to do otherwise will bring a total midterms wipeout. Democrats also have to accept that this duly elected administration is not about to abolish ICE entirely, given its mandate from voters to secure the border. At this point, in the near term, the issue is how ICE goes about its business, not that it has no business at all. That will be a matter for the postmidterms Congress, as chosen by the voters.

Trump, of course, made all of this worse over the weekend by trying to link this issue, which is difficult enough, with the approval of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, which passed the House in February. Whatever the merits of requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration and a photo ID at the time of voting, that has nothing to do with issues involving the funding of the Department of Homeland Security. Holding Americans hostage in security lines because of the actions of Democrats in Congress over an unrelated electoral matter is simply unacceptable.

Trump used to say he liked to make deals. Time to get one made, to get America’s airports moving again and put Americans back on planes and headed where they need to go.

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