I wonder how many low info voters know who makes the decisions on what gets paid, and what doesn't. EXECUTIVE BRANCH.

Disgrace: Shutdown preventing payment of “death gratuity” to families of fallen troops

posted at 6:41 pm on October 8, 2013 by Allahpundit

A travesty, needless to say, although it appears to be more the result of a drafting error than any sort of oversight or deliberate snub. Remember, the one exception to the Democrats’ rule about not agreeing to small GOP funding bills targeted at individual departments is the military. Congress passed a bill on the eve of the shutdown to make sure that troops continued to get paid. Per Blackfive, House Armed Services Committee chair Buck McKeon issued a statement saying that he thought the bill covered all sorts of military payments, including the roughly $100,000 “death gratuity” paid to the family of a fallen soldier. Quote: “Without question, that was our clear intent.” And no doubt it was. Why on earth would they agree to pay troops in the field but not the bereaved families of the fallen? If they’re terrified of the politics of American soldiers going unpaid, imagine their terror at the thought of wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, and above all children being left momentarily broke due to a soldier being killed in action.

The Pentagon studied the law, though, and decided that no, it doesn’t cover the “death gratuity,” nor reimbursement for family members to fly to Dover AFB to retrieve their loved one’s body. Right now, all of that’s on hold. Why the Pentagon would read the law that exactingly given that Congress’s intent was clear and the fact that surely no one would have sued to block payment of the gratuities had they gone ahead with it, I have no idea. But here we are:

“It is upsetting because my husband died for his country, and now his family is left to worry,” said Ashley Peters of Springfield, Mo., whose husband, Jeremy, was a special agent assigned to the Army’s 5th Military Police Battalion and was among the five killed. “My husband always said if something happened to him we would be taken care of.”…

“If Congress were trapped in a car that sunk down in a river, I would swim to the window, and I would look them all in the eye and say, ‘Suck water,’” said Randall Patterson, the father of Private [Cody] Patterson. The father used an expletive to characterize members of Congress who “are still getting paid.”…

The mother and brother of Peters, the special agent from the 5th Military Police Battalion, said that they were too upset to talk. His step-grandfather, Peters Jerry, said that the sergeant was getting out of the military after this tour, so that he could be home more with his 20-month-old son.

“It will be devastating,” Jerry said of the delay in the death gratuity. He said that he blamed Republicans and the Tea Party…

Also suspended is a year’s worth of housing allowance, typically paid in a lump sum to the surviving spouse or dependent children of a soldier. For a sergeant in the Washington area with dependents, it amounts to more than $2,000 per month.

At least one military charity has stepped into the breach to cover the costs of airfare to Dover while they’re waiting for Congress to get its act together. Blackfive notes that Pfc. Cody Patterson’s family in particular is in “severe financial distress” and has links up to several charities where you can donate. This will, though, hopefully all be resolved by this time tomorrow; given the media attention to the “death gratuity” lapsing and the understandable public horror over it, House members are already putting together a new funding bill. Presumably it’ll be passed through the lower chamber tonight and the Senate tomorrow. If it isn’t, someone will have to answer.

“We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around.”
—Ronald Reagan

The conduct of the National Park Service over the last week might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration. This is an expansive claim, of course. Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS, the NSA, the HHS mandate—this is an administration that has not lacked for appalling abuses of power. And we still have three years to go.

Even so, consider the actions of the National Park Service since the government shutdown began. People first noticed what the NPS was up to when the World War II Memorial on the National Mall was “closed.” Just to be clear, the memorial is an open plaza. There is nothing to operate. Sometimes there might be a ranger standing around. But he’s not collecting tickets or opening gates. Putting up barricades and posting guards to “close” the World War II Memorial takes more resources and manpower than “keeping it open.”

The closure of the World War II Memorial was just the start of the Park Service’s partisan assault on the citizenry. There’s a cute little historic site just outside of the capital in McLean, Virginia, called the Claude Moore Colonial Farm. They do historical reenactments, and once upon a time the National Park Service helped run the place. But in 1980, the NPS cut the farm out of its budget. A group of private citizens set up an endowment to take care of the farm’s expenses. Ever since, the site has operated independently through a combination of private donations and volunteer workers.

The farm’s administrators appealed this directive—they explained that the Park Service doesn’t actually do anything for the historic site. The folks at the NPS were unmoved. And so, last week, the National Park Service found the scratch to send officers to the park to forcibly remove both volunteer workers and visitors.

Think about that for a minute. The Park Service, which is supposed to serve the public by administering parks, is now in the business of forcing parks they don’t administer to close. As Homer Simpson famously asked, did we lose a war?

We’re not done yet. The parking lot at Mount Vernon was closed by the NPS, too, even though the Park Service does not own Mount Vernon; it just controls access to the parking lots from the George Washington Parkway. At the Vietnam Memorial—which is just a wall you walk past—the NPS called in police to block access. But the pièce de résistance occurred in South Dakota. The Park Service wasn’t content just to close Mount Rushmore. No, they went the extra mile and put out orange cones to block the little scenic overlook areas on the roads near Mount Rushmore. You know, just to make sure no taxpayers could catch a glimpse of it.

It’s one thing for politicians to play shutdown theater. It’s another thing entirely for a civil bureaucracy entrusted with the privilege of caring for our national heritage to wage war against the citizenry on behalf of a political party.

This is how deep the politicization of Barack Obama’s administration goes. The Park Service falls under the Department of the Interior, and its director is a political appointee. Historically, the directorship has been nonpartisan and the service has functioned as a civil, not a political, unit. Before the current director, Jonathan Jarvis, was nominated by President Obama, he’d spent 30 years as a civil servant. But he has taken to his political duties with all the fervor of a third-tier hack from the DNC, marrying the disinterested contempt of a meter maid with the zeal of an ambitious party apparatchik.

It’s worth recalling that the Park Service has always been deeply ambivalent about the public which they’re charged with serving. In a 2005 Weekly Standard piece about the NPS’s plan to reconfigure the National Mall, Andrew Ferguson reported:

The Park Service’s ultimate desire was made public, indiscreetly, by John Parsons, associate regional park director for the mall. In 2000 Parsons told the Washington Post he hoped that eventually all unauthorized traffic, whether by foot or private car, would be moved off the mall. Visitors could park in distant satellite lots and be bused to nodal points, where they would be watered and fed, allowed to tour a monument, and then reboard a bus and head for another monument. “Just like at Disneyland,” Parsons told the Post. “Nobody drives through Disneyland. They’re not allowed. And we’ve got the better theme park.”

I wonder how many low info voters know who makes the decisions on what gets paid, and what doesn't. EXECUTIVE BRANCH.

Disgrace: Shutdown preventing payment of “death gratuity” to families of fallen troops

posted at 6:41 pm on October 8, 2013 by Allahpundit

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