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?