The obstinacy of the National Park Service is nothing new. When I was in the Senate in 2004, I was approached by the May Company with an idea to publicize October as Breast Cancer awareness month. The company, which was headquartered in St. Louis, wanted to put pink filters on the lighting of the St. Louis Arch for a few days in October and offered to pay all the costs associated with the project.

I thought it was a good way of publicizing the dangers of breast cancer and honoring those women who were fighting the disease. I had a personal interest; years before, breast cancer had killed my mother.

But changing the lighting of the Arch required the permission of the Park Service because the Arch is part of the Jefferson National Memorial.

I assumed the Park Service would be willing to cooperate in one of the few causes that seemed to be both worthy and popular with everyone. I was wrong. The Service refused to permit the display. The official reason was that if they allowed the Arch to be lit pink in honor of breast-cancer awareness, they would have to permit other disease advocacy groups, or at least those which had adopted a color to symbolize their cause and were willing to pay the cost, to do the same thing. Even if true, that did not strike me as a bad thing. After all, we are, as Ronald Reagan said, a nation with a government, not the other way around. Why not use the Arch a few days each year to encourage preventive health screenings, or lift the spirits of sick people, at no cost to the taxpayer?

So I included a provision in that year’s appropriations bill authorizing the Service to allow the lighting. In those days, the Executive Branch did not believe it had the discretion to ignore the laws of the United States, and the Arch was lit pink, with satisfactory results.

The practice has been repeated a number of times since then, but not this October — according to this tweet from the Arch’s custodians. Of course, they blame the government shutdown. Evidently highlighting breast cancer awareness is not as essential as the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” website, which the taxpayers do pay for, and which exhorts people to drink more water, in the name of better health.