Legally there is nothing that the President could do about shutting down the World War II Memorial once there is no budget. It could be argued that the President could order the Secretary of the Interior and the Director of the Park Service to take no steps to actively close those sites.
However as I mentioned above, one of the legal charges to the National Park Service is to protect and preserve all National Park sites in perpetuity. While people are pissed that they can’t visit a park today, the NPS needs to take steps to make sure that their great grandchildren will have a park to visit in 2113. While monuments seem indestructible, they are not.
Two other notes: one the Director of the Park Service was on NPR the other day and noted that due to the post 9/11 mentality security needs and concerns have changed dramatically since the last shut down requiring a firmer presence.
Two, despite claims to the contrary, this image shows that in 1995 the Lincoln Memorial was barricaded during the shut down. It is just what need to be done.
Spin is a marvelous thing, but any federal elected official on either side of the aisle who claims to be surprised that the Memorials are shut down without a budget is either being disingenuous or too stupid to represent anyone.
Peggy Noonan is totally, absolutely, mind-numbingly wrong when she refers to “shutting down of things that everyone knows don’t have to be shut down.” That’s what a government shutdown does. It shuts things down. There is no money flowing to these departments and programs.
Some things are kept going because they are essential to life and safety (the military, air traffic control, firefighting and law enforcement). Other things, well, aren’t essential. They have no money, they can’t be kept going. For Noonan to say parks and memorials “don’t have to be shut down” is dazzlingly partisan, if not outright crazypants bonkers.
And let’s face it, as WreckingCrew refers to … can you imagine the GOP outrage if the administration had left the national parks and monuments unbarricaded, only to find them vandalized, graffiti-ized and dismantled? The conservative reaction here literally left the administration in a no-win scenario worse than the Kobayashi Maru.
Of course the memorials didn’t need to be shut down. Nothing in the government needed to be shut down: It’s easy to get the funding to run all of it. Which makes it all the more inexplicable that the Republicans in the House decided to shut it down anyway.
Speaking as a severely partisan observer, I see a strange disconnect, another reason why cognitive dissonance should be considered the number one threat to the nation.
ObamaCare is not terrifically popular, true. But neither are American clamoring for relief from this monstrosity, God help us all.
For example, “conservative” opinion cartoonist Glen McCoy:
Irs not Marxism. Its not even socialism, its not even socialism lite! Its a device for funneling money into health insurance companies who have done a wretched job! You don’t buy insurance, you buy a chance to play Wheel of Coverage!
Rumor mongering: to the effect that the Chamber of Commerce is offering to throw its money behind moderate Republicans who may face a challenge in the primaries from the Insane Clown Posse. I hope the Chamber of Commerce wins, and I never ever thought I’d say that. Might as well get me a bowl of circus peanuts and a Coors.
It’s not the buying of insurance. It is the federal subsidies that the big majority of those signing up will be getting. That creates/propagates the culture of dependency on the federal government. You may scoff at that, but that’s the reason. Not the “marxism” strawman.
The trouble is, it’s right-wing op-ed material, like the cartoon just linked, that promote the marxism strawman. The right wing is the one engaging in the straw man!
(What, did you imagine the left created that cartoon?)
I know it’s a misattributed quote, and may have been invented in 1950s, but it doesn’t make it any less pithy:
“A democracy … can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses…”
I remember in Vancouver a few years back there was a big general stike of various civic services, including the garbage collection, and soon enough before too much trash accumuated, entrepreneurs moved in and kept things moving.
Plenty of government functions could be run, and probably better, by private businesses.
Bunches, for sure. Prisons, for instance, that experiment is working out great! Well, maybe not exactly great. And higher education, for sure, some of those outfits like Phoenix University are turning out debt-crippled baristas and bicycle messengers by the thousands! Private police will not be necessary, since everybody will be armed. A nation of armed neighborhood watch commandoes, what could possibly go wrong?
Of course prison and law enforcement and military need to be run by a state, but some services like taking care of parks, while still national monuments, could be done as a private business. In exceptional cases where the government fails to fulfil its responsibility, then citizens have to find some way to keep things running through an emergency.
If you really want your national parks to be gradually flogged off to real estate developpers or leased to mining/logging conglomerates, sure. Then again, I do kinda look forward to the Donal Trump WW2 Memorial And Casino :D.
There’s a fundamental conflict of interest there. The essence of a national park/museum is to provide the benefits of the park to the maximum amount of citizens, indefinitely. The point of a private entreprise is to maximize owner/shareholder short term profits regardless of any other consideration. Never the twain shall meet.
IME too many times the definition of “small government” used by different groups who propose it boils down to “less direct government jobs”: the functions must still be performed, but by subcontractors, something which very often ends up being more expensive and providing a worse service.
I gather you’ve never lived in a community where a tax issue was defeated at the polls.
The strategy commonly used is to eliminate services in the most obvious and painful way possible, to push the electorate into voting the money at the next election (as opposed to making cuts to minimize the impact). Thus schools eliminate sports rather than dismiss useless administrators, libraries shut down entirely on weekends rather than rationing new book and media purchases etc. etc.
Whoever arranged to barricade the WWII memorial was just being more blatant and clueless than public officials usually are in such circumstances.