In April, with painful memories of last winter’s 35-day partial government shutdown still raw, Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, delivered a favorite shutdown anecdote: During the 16-day governmentwide shutdown in 2013 under President Obama, Gohmert joined some World War II veterans in a visit to the Iwo Jima Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, Va. The National Park Service had barricaded the site, Gohmert recalled at a 2019 hearing of the House Natural Resources Committee on the Interior Department’s reorganization.
“I was absolutely appalled” that the nation’s veterans were “being harassed,” he said, describing a busload of veterans of the Iwo Jima battle who had arrived at the site and “busted up” the barricades. “We didn’t let the enemy keep us from getting to the top of Mount Suribachi,” the veterans reportedly said. “So we won’t let a little wooden barricade keep us from the memorial.”
A National Park Service spokesman told Government Executive in May that the agency had no information on such an incident. But similar Republican attacks on the Park Service for closing war monuments to tourists during the 2013 appropriations lapse threw into relief a key difference between the two political parties.
Under the Obama administration, during an angry hearing in October 2013, National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis resisted Republican attacks and defended the closing of war monuments as required by appropriations law. Consistent with the requirements of the amended 1884 Antideficiency Act, the service “was forced to close all 401 national parks across the country and furlough more than 20,000 National Park Service employees,” Jarvis told a joint hearing of the ..
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