THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Thanks to an amazing failure to perform their jobs properly, the Secret Service is responding to last weeks intruder with suggestions for "expanding" the White House security perimeter. And the public response has been entirely negative.

Washingtonians are pushing back against suggestions that the U.S. Secret Service might make it harder for the public to get close to the White House.

Reports in recent days suggested the service might respond to a security breach at the White House by increasing the security perimeter around the White House.

But locals and tourists alike, including Washington’s nonvoting member of Congress and a prominent architecture critic, say the service charged with guarding the president shouldn’t punish the public for its own lapse.

“Under no circumstances should the Secret Service be allowed to encroach further on the public space of Washington,” wrote Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post’s art and architecture critic. “This is an institutional, organizational problem,” he wrote. “It does not require an architectural solution.”

Officials already have gone too far in pushing back the public in the name of security throughout the nation’s capital, he said. “Ill-considered, unnecessary and undemocratic security measures” already block the public from the west terrace at the U.S. Capitol and from the front doors of the Supreme Court, he said.

The service on Monday imposed what it called a “temporary buffer zone” along the public sidewalk on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the White House. The waist-high barriers – like those used for crowd control at parades – prevent the public from getting close to the fence.

A spokesman for the Secret Service said Wednesday that the temporary closure would be in effect while the service conducted a “comprehensive review” of the fence-jumping incident last Friday, in which a man with a small knife climbed over the permanent fence, bolted across the lawn and made it into the White House before being detained.

The SS is so slow to respond that they must increase the distance to give themselves a fighting chance. So much for those steely eyed lightning responses they are supposedly trained for.