Lansdale, a Canton area youth pastor, makes a pilgrimage to Gatlinburg every year with his family but didn’t think how the government shutdown would affect his trip.
“It’s one of my dreams to hike the entire Appalachian Trail …, and that’s one of the things I try to do is to hike a little bit of that each time,” he said. “But with the park closing, I can’t do that.”
The finger-pointing between Congressional Republicans and Democrats and President Barack Obama continued throughout the first two days of the shutdown, and is expected to extend into a third day. The shutdown circulates raising the debt ceiling, which allows the Congress to pay the bills its already approved, and the Republicans wanting to tie in defunding the Affordable Health Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare, into that same bill. The Affordable Health Care Act was signed into law in March 2010 and has been phased in since that time.
In addition to closing national parks, other federal government functions, including transportation, NASA, and veterans services, will also be closed to the public. Various news agencies have reported the shutdown will cost the U.S. economy $300 million a day.
The left blames Speaker of the House John Boehner, 8th Congressional District representative from West Chester Twp., for allowing himself to be pushed around by his party’s extremists. But the right is proud of the “tough stance” Ohio’s native son is taking, said Butler County GOP chairman Dave Kern.
“He has made the effort for resolution,” said Kern, and claims the Democrats have “refused to sit down” to negotiate.
“I’m proud and happy that he’s standing firm,” said the Liberty Twp. trustee and board member of the county Board of Elections. “Compromise means you give up some on your stance. The Democrats said, ‘We’re not moving, but you have to move.’ That isn’t compromise.”
Local Democrats call the Republican’s “obsession with sabotaging the health care law” has reached an all-time low, said David Spurrier, spokesman for the Butler County Democratic Party. And he said this “GOP shutdown” will harm the economy and the middle class.
“Speaker Boehner has enabled a small faction in his party’s caucus to hold the federal government and our economy hostage over their refusal to accept the results of an election,” Spurrier said. “Republicans should work together with the president and their Democratic colleagues to improve the law while also focusing on real issues Americans are struggling with everyday.”
Some of the Democratic Congressmen speaking on the House floor Wednesday blamed the Republican-elected tea party members, claiming they had influenced Boehner to — as they see it — not compromise.
Susan McLaughlin, a Liberty Twp. Tea Party board member, said the whole ordeal is “a lack of leadership from the top.”
“It should have been done a long time ago,” she said. “They knew this was coming.”
While McLaughlin said Obama is at the top of the blame list, she said “there’s enough blame to go around.”
“We need to stop the name calling. We need to grow up and we need to sit down at the table and we need to start talking,” she said “We need to look at the facts and look at reason and government and compromise. You can’t always get your way.”
Kern said he feels it’s appropriate to tie funding the Affordable Health Care Act with raising of the debt ceiling because “the law is so dangerous.”
“I’m very glad that at least one part of our government has dedicated itself to bring costs under control and to defund Obamacare,” he Kern.
But Spurrier said the right in Washington, D.C., is “driving the nation’s economy over the cliff.”
On Thursday, with the federal government still expected to be partially closed for business, Landsale will make another trek to Newfound Gap in the Smoky Mountains. He hopes to give himself a late birthday present and hike a few miles of the Appalachian Trail.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Lansdale said. “It’s all kind of iffy, you don’t know what you’re going to get until you get up there. The plan right now is still possibly still go hiking.”
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