They (Congress and TSA) have PR-palatable way around this problem: stop doing something silly/stupid and retarget that effort at something useful.

For example, pre war-on-water, they admitted that explosives were the real threat, not small hand tools, and so they stopped forbidding small hand tools.

IMO they could easily justify ending the shoe carnival, war-on-water, laptops out policy, pointy-object search (i.e., small knives), and even aggressive ID-checking and retargeting all of that effort on using an ETD or puffer on at least one item (bag or person) from every passenger. Such a measure would massively increase security against explosives (liquid or solid), which are the biggest threat to commercial aircraft after guns and large knives.

I would fully support such a measure, as long as TSA articulated a clear and fair policy for dealing with false positives from the ETD/puffer that acknowledges that a false-positive followed by a negative hand search is not probable cause for excessive harassment, complies with the Privacy Act, and does not result in unreasonable detention or humiliation. (Oh, and false positive == passenger did not have bomb but machine alarmed; don't give me the BS that triggering on hand lotion isn't a false positive because the lotion actually contains glycerin)