Whether their acts are punishable by law or a legitimate citizen protest against the federal government is an emerging question as the shutdown entered Day 8.
Hundreds of national park and forest service sites from Washington State to Washington, D.C., have been barricaded or closed amid a government shutdown over the implementation of Obamacare. The political sniping has focused on who is to blame for the budget impasse: Republicans for pushing the issue to a budgetary brink, or President Obama and Democrats for failing, at least, to entertain Republican ideas.
Yet the barricaded federal lands issue has particularly focused on whether it’s really necessary to close off public lands that aren’t regularly patrolled, that are leased to private entities, or are simply open-air monuments without pay gates. For some areas, millions of dollars in tourism revenue is at stake.
“We’ve gone from ‘this land is your land, this land is my land,’ to the government saying this land is its land,” writes University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds in an e-mail. “President Obama said that government is just a word for the things we do together. Apparently that includes kicking WWII veterans off their memorial.”