The Wages of the Attempted Republican Coup

Some more eggs have been broken as Republicans attempt to build an anti-democracy omelet out rancid ham and rusty nails:

Late-breaking news, and I’ll update as I find out more: While the government is shut down, with food-safety personnel and disease detectives sent home and forbidden to work, a major foodborne-illness outbreak has begun. This evening, the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the US Department of Agriculture announced that “an estimated 278 illnesses … reported in 18 states” have been caused by chicken contaminated with Salmonella Heidelberg and possibly produced by the firm Foster Farms.

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That means that the lab work and molecular detection that can link far-apart cases and define the size and seriousness of outbreaks are not happening. At the CDC, which operates the national foodborne-detection services FoodNet and PulseNet, scientists couldn’t work on this if they wanted to; they have been locked out of their offices, lab and emails. (At a conference I attended last week, 10 percent of the speakers did not show up because they were CDC personnel and risked being fired if they traveled even voluntarily.)

Relatedly, syndicated columnist William F. George is outraged that the government would reduce its services just because House Republicans refuse to fund them:

From his new perch at Fox News, meanwhile, George Will argued that the National Park Service is acting like a “willing servant” of the Democrats. “All around the country,” Will said, the government “went out of [its] way to make life as unpleasant and inconvenient as possible.” Will went on to call the closure of parks “government acting as an interest group on its own behalf.”

So, it’s illegitimate for the shutdown to have the obvious consequences of a shutdown because this would imply that useful government services are useful in contradiction of Will’s ideology. I can see why Will finds Fox News more comfortable if he wants to make arguments with that many layers of illogic.