Brian mentioned this in last night’s open thread, so I thought I’d crosspost it from the California High Speed Rail Blog.

Jerry Lewis, a Republican Congressman from Southern California (Redlands, to be specific), is leading his party’s efforts to use their majority to embarrass and frustrate President Barack Obama’s efforts at economic recovery by proposing a bill to take back all unspent stimulus funds – including California’s $2 billion in high speed rail money:

Wasting no time after a victorious midterm election, GOP Congressional leaders who promised to slash spending are looking to make an example out of the nation’s priciest public works project: California’s $43 billion high-speed railroad.

A coalition of 27 House Republicans, led by the ranking member of the committee that controls spending, wants to yank $2 billion in stimulus funds promised to California to kick start the massive project.

U.S. Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, last week introduced the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Rescission Act,” which would return the final $12 billion in unspent and uncommitted stimulus funds to the U.S. Treasury to help fight the $1.3 trillion U.S. deficit.

About half the remaining stimulus money is set aside for planned high-speed rail projects. The largest is in California, which has spent nearly $200 million of its $2.25 billion award on planning but is saving the rest for construction.

It’s worth noting that if nothing is done – if this bill dies and no other bill undermining stimulus funding is approved – then the status quo remains. Congress has already authorized this money to be spent, so the Executive Branch can award the funds and deliver them from the US Treasury to the state of California.

Is this a serious threat to the HSR project? Hard to tell. It’s difficult to imagine this getting through the US Senate or getting the president’s signature. Unfortunately, Democrats have also become adept at making “compromises” to appease the right in the rather odd belief that doing so would help Democratic fortunes, so we can’t rule this out entirely.

On the other hand, Republicans are making noise about using the spring vote on raising the country’s debt ceiling to force massive spending cuts. That would be the moment when I could envision Obama caving to the Republicans. He has made a big show of his support for high speed rail, but if Republicans are forcing him to choose between a national debt default and cutting back his HSR program, well, I’m not convinced Obama would call the Republicans’ bluff.

It should be obvious that cutting these funds would be an insanely reckless thing to do – but that’s the House Republican Caucus for you. They’ve totally abandoned any effort to provide economic recovery or build new infrastructure, and are determined to shackle this country to its cars in order to enrich their oil company friends.

The best way to stop this from happening is to take action. We’re going to be doing that as soon as we can. Californians will need to speak up loudly to ensure that our Senators and the president don’t cave in to these ludicrous and reckless Republican demands.