The hits just keep on coming, folks. Up next, Washington looks to extend its reach to the country’s rail systems in a proposal by the Obama administration. Apparently, they’re not satisfied with their unconstitutional control of banks, the auto industry, the energy industries, and health care.
by Michael Naragon
In a story that first surfaced Sunday in The Washington Post and was reprinted by FOXNews.com, President Obama’s subordinates have expressed a desire to get a grip on the nation’s rails.
Administration officials cite poor management and lack of oversight as their reasons for taking over the light-rail industry, which leads me to wonder: could the American people take back the federal government using the same line of logic? Cities affected by the federal usurpation would include Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and every other city, large or small, that uses a rail system, such as a subway. Washington officials are using last summer’s Metro Red Line crash in D.C. to justify taking over the systems across the country.
“After the [Metro] train crash,” said Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation, “we were all sitting around here scratching our heads, saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to do something about this.’ And we discovered that there’s not much we could do, because the law wouldn’t allow us to do it.”
It appears from the Post’s piece that the measure has at least some degree of bipartisan support, as two Republicans, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), said the administration was right in raising concerns. To be fair, Coburn did qualify his statement by saying the federal government should be limited in its regulation to rail lines that cross state lines.
It is striking that, after allowing our federal government to become so bloated and ineffective, that officials still have time to sit around and think about other areas they’d like to control, as if the federal government’s track record at regulation is so effective that they feel compelled to take over and fix things. Does not the FAA regulate airlines? Do we not still have incidents? However, the pervasive school of thought in 21st century America is to give all our problems to Washington, where they can be solved. Or, if not solved, at least buried so deeply in bureaucracy and political pandering that they become unsolvable problems and, therefore, are no longer our direct concern. Comfortably numb, as Pink Floyd put it.
