As the presidential election cycle heats up, Republicans are looking for ways to undermine President Barack Obama. One of their tried and true tactics is to take high profile initiatives of the Obama Administration and poke holes in them, make them look like scandalous wasteful failures rather than bold, innovative, effective projects. Congressional Republicans already hate high speed rail, and Darrell Issa’s investigation into the California HSR project is clearly intended as a bash-the-president exercise.
Given that, why on earth would State Senate Democrats be willing to undermine the HSR project and give Republicans – including Mitt Romney – another opportunity to attack the president? Unfortunately that seems to be exactly what some Senate Dems have in mind:
Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) has been arguing for weeks that it is impractical for the rail authority to think the Senate could hold hearings and approve the $68-billion rail system – the biggest infrastructure project in state history – in a couple of months.
As a result, the Senate’s Democratic leadership is considering whether to delay including money for construction of an initial rail segment in the 2013-14 budget this spring, and instead push the decision into August before the Legislature recesses. The budget deadline is June 15, but appropriations can be made in separate legislation until Aug. 31.
“The timing is still being discussed, but we should have a better idea in the coming days,” said a spokeswoman for Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg. “It is not uncommon to appropriate bond funds in a bill outside of the budget act.”
There are two important things to consider here. First, a delay would be used by Republicans and Mitt Romney as a justification to argue that President Obama, by investing $3.5 billion in federal funds in the California HSR project, is wasting taxpayer dollars on a project that even some California Democrats don’t like. Already Senators like Joe Simitian and Alan Lowenthal – who wants to become a Congressional Democrat himself! – have provided crucial ammunition to Republicans like Darrell Issa by repeating claims about the project that are false and flawed, including about the ridership projections. Delaying the funding decision until the eve of the Republican convention strikes me as a very bad thing to do, playing right into their hands.
The other thing is that Simitian is, as usual, wrong about what is going on here. Nothing is being rushed. This project has been under development for the last 15 years. The legislature held extensive hearings in 2008 before placing Prop 1A on the ballot. Voters have already approved the system, and four more years of project planning and development have taken place since then, all with extensive public involvement.
The legislature can and should make this decision by June 15. After all, it makes every other budget decision, many of them complicated and significant, in that time frame. It’s routine. It’s also their job.
For those reasons, a delay is both unnecessary and politically unjustifiable. I’ve worked with Darrell Steinberg in the past and I know he is a smart guy. So let me offer some free advice. Don’t listen to Joe Simitian. Simitian is termed out at the end of this year. Why on earth should he be allowed to undermine the project and undermine President Obama’s re-election chances? It doesn’t make sense. Simitian has zero leverage here. Just ignore him, and move ahead with the HSR funding decision as part of the larger budget.
The LA Times also has an interesting item regarding the HSR budget request:
Meanwhile, Gov. Jerry Brown has sent to the Legislature a budget order that lays out his funding request for the rail project. The technical document from Brown’s Department of Finance set at least one new condition that nobody expected.
Brown wants to forbid any funding for urban rail transit projects, which are part of the so-called blended approach to the bullet train project that the rail authority has proposed, unless the Legislature also approves money for the Central Valley segment.
Awesome. Governor Jerry Brown is a freaking rock star and the best thing that has happened to high speed rail in years. The Central Valley segment is key to the project and absolutely should be part of the initial construction. Kudos to him for standing up for this project.
or you share the Governor’s incipiently active* senility. I can fathom no other explanation for your continuing apologia of this disaster.
Fundamentally, the real parties in interest, in clear conflict with the authority granted by the measure, have presented a plan that can only be called, with mordant mockery, High Speed Rail. To do so they have stretched and folded the numbers, which were phoney from the outset, to the point of being occult.
Perhaps what most important to our progressive cause is that the constituency for this project is fairly low on the pecking order under the dome. Teachers, nurses and firefighters are the folks whom we trot out to buttress our plans; social workers, cops, prison guards and the ethnic ladies in purple shirts who have Roman numerals in their job titles, as do I, all rank higher in the food chain and every dollar that goes to this boondoggle is a dollar out of their pockets. This is a fact of which the Democratic legislators have been made quietly, though probably not subtly, aware.
*this seemed like a cool oxymoron
So, California is supposed to approve HSR because it might help Obama’s Re-Election ??
INTERCOURSE OBAMA
This project should be decided on its own merits
and the logic for this ‘Public-Private Project’ seems pretty shaky
DON’T Throw good money after Bad
Pencil this out and see if it makes sense
Let Obama take care of his own political fate
He seems to be pretty focused on it
(Granted, Republicans are POISON)