Shameful

The reports of private citizens being inconvenienced or even harassed by federal agents "enforcing" the shutdown have been pouring in over the past few days:  90-something World War II veterans barred entry to the WWII Memorial in DC (or attempted barred entry).  A hotel owner along the Blue Ridge Parkway was forced to shut down during peak tourism season simply because the Pisgah Inn is located along the federally-run parkway, depriving him of his most profitable season and his employees of pay.  Elderly residents of privately-owned homes located on federal land forced out of their homes.  Traffic cones placed along the road outside of Mt. Rushmore to prevent passers-by from even stopping to look at the closed monument.  Park rangers attempt to shut down Mount Vernon, a privately-owned historical site whose parking lot apparently happens to be jointly-owned by the Federal Park Service.  The Grand Canyon shut down, despite offers by Arizona's state government to use private donations to fund the park's operation during the shutdown.  Access to Florida Bay (the ocean!) is cut off to charter fishermen.  

A federal park ranger was actually quoted as saying that they have been ordered to "make things as difficult as possible" for people during the shutdown. The shutdown is naturally going to cause pain for some people -- particularly for government employees, who will have to defer income until a CR is passed, and for contractors, among others.  But the tactics being employed by the Administration appear to be aimed at maximizing the pain from the shutdown in order to gain political points against the Republicans, to whom the president believes he can shift all of the blame for the shutdown, even as he refuses to negotiate to reach a solution and reopen the government.  So confident of this is the White House that an unnamed official was quoted as saying that it did not matter to them how long the shutdown lasts, because "we're winning".  (Naturally, the White House has sense disavowed this statement.)

Perhaps shifting the blame for these bizarre closures onto House and Senate Republicans would be more plausible if these measures were actually mandated by a government shutdown.  The problem is that they are not.  One could understand closing, say, federally-maintained rest areas along the Blue Ridge Parkway (somebody has to clean the toilets), but there is no practical reason why the World War II monument, for example, should be closed to visitors due to a shutdown (in fact, from a fiscal standpoint, erecting barriers and stationing patrols to keep tourists out incurs greater cost than leaving it open), and certainly not in forcing the Pisgah Inn's closure. 

So petty, so despotic, so childish in fact is this behavior by the executive branch, I find it difficult to even characterize it in rational terms. 

In a previous post, I explained how Niskanen predicted that, faced with cuts, a government agency will threaten to cut its most highly-valued service in order to motivate its appropriators to restore funding; in that post, I argued that this characterized the president's behavior in seeking to "maximize the pain" from the cuts associated with sequestration.  The president is doing it again, but this time, due to the much larger scope of services affected, he is able to inflict that much more pain.  We as citizens and voters should not view lightly behavior by the executive branch of our government to willfully increase the pain to private citizens from an already difficult situation.  As Speaker Boehner said, "This is not a... game!"  The president should stop treating it as one.