A Puzzler

Sometimes I think I’m just not smart enough to understand politics.

Today on Fox News they were talking again about the prospects of a government shutdown.  Now, we all know that in a government shutdown they don’t actually padlock the doors to Congress or evict the President; they shut down everything except “essential services” — the military keeps operating, mines still get inspected, all that sort of thing.

So I had an idea.  Let’s shut down the government and leave it shut down.  They can continue running essential services — I’d be curious how long they can do that before they run out of credit limit — under whatever authority it is that lets them run essential services in a shutdown.  But the rest of government is, by definition, inessential.

So why do them?