“The Failure Of Austerity”: This Upcoming Traffic Apocalypse Will Be The End Of Chris Christie
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) is infamous as the guy whose underlings caused an epic traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge as part of some weird political punishment. In time, though, he will be known as the guy who caused the worst transportation snarl in the history of New York City.
I can’t see how this traffic disaster will mean anything but the end of Christie’s 2016 aspirations. The question for New Yorkers looking down the barrel of this sucker is whether it will be bad enough to break the hegemony of austerity in Congress.
So, what is happening? Let’s wind the tape back to 2010. The Recovery Act was in full swing, and all manner of stuff was being built across the country with stimulus money. The biggest project of all was called Access to the Region’s Core, a plan for a desperately needed new tunnel under the Hudson River and a new train station in Manhattan. There are only two other tunnels under the Hudson, both single-track and over 100 years old, both stuffed to capacity during rush hour, with demand only projected to grow.
The cost was projected at around $8 billion to $10 billion, with the federal government and the Port Authority picking up roughly three-quarters of the tab. Construction started in 2009, and hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on rights-of-way and initial work.
Then Christie unilaterally canceled the project, charging that costs were skyrocketing, that New Jersey would thus have to pay 70 percent of the bill, and that the feds were going to stick the state with any cost overruns.
He was lying through his teeth. A Government Accountability Office report later detailed that cost estimates had not increased, that New Jersey was only paying 14.4 percent, and the feds had offered to share the burden of any overruns. Instead, Christie swiped the money earmarked for the project and spent a bunch of it on New Jersey’s highway fund, so he wouldn’t have to raise the gas tax. (He’s under investigation by the SEC and the Manhattan DA for that, among other things.)
It was an infuriatingly stupid decision. But Hurricane Sandy changed it from stupid to disastrous. During the storm surge both the tunnels under the Hudson were flooded with ocean water, and the deposited salts are eating away the 100-year-old metal and concrete. Therefore, according to a recent study, both tunnels will need a total top-to-bottom overhaul in the next few years. Shutting even one of them down would basically be traffic apocalypse:
…shutting one of the two tracks in the tunnel under the Hudson River would cut service by about 75 percent because trains headed into New York would have to share the remaining track with trains headed west from the city, he said.
All told, more than 400,000 passengers ride trains through the two tunnels on a typical weekday, an Amtrak spokesman said. At peak commuting times, 24 trains an hour pass through the Hudson River tunnel, which is the only direct rail link between Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan and all points west. [New York Times]
In a blackly comedic coincidence, the canceled ARC tunnel would have come online in 2018, maybe just barely in time to take up the slack from one of the old ones being closed. Now those 300,000 or so displaced commuters are going to have to swim across the Hudson.
Anyway, according to the Times, Amtrak is going to work on the tunnels under the East River first, with no firm plans as to when they’re going to have to shut down the Hudson tunnels. They have a plan for another tunnel called the Gateway, but no way to pay for it as of yet.
And that brings us to Congress. The prospects for action at the federal level are nearly hopeless, but it’s worth noting that if they wanted to, Congress could solve this problem — just by appropriating some money for a new tunnel. Probably the best chance of that will be after the old tunnels are shut down and there’s a massive traffic jam from Newark to Long Island.
But in any case, Christie’s boneheaded posturing is at least yet another demonstration of the failure of austerity. Turns out not spending money doesn’t make crippling infrastructure needs disappear. It just postpones the day of reckoning, and raises the chances of expensive catastrophic failure.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, October 3, 2014
“The New Credential For 2016”: For Republicans, “Come And Get Me, Coppers”, More Politically Acceptable Than Expressing Contrition
We’ve heard the argument before with respect to Chris Christie and Scott Walker that the abuse-of-power investigations they’ve faced could actually help them as presidential candidates, so long as they stay out of the slammer and can blame their persecution on the godless liberals. But now that Rick Perry has joined the Shadow-of-the-Hoosegow club, RealClearPolitics’ Scott Conroy offers a general theory that they’ll all benefit from a presumption that legal problems mean The Left is afraid of them and wants them hauled off in chains before they can roar through the primaries like avenging angels.
It’s a strategy that may pay dividends in a 2016 primary fight, as all three would be courting conservative voters who will likely see the investigations as badges of honor.
Bob Haus, who helmed Perry’s 2012 campaign in Iowa and is poised to reprise that role in 2016, said the “overwhelming response” from activists in the nation’s first voting state has been strongly supportive.
“They see the actions against Governor Perry for what they are: raw politics,” Haus said. “I would also say that Governor Perry has shown great strength and resolve in this matter. He and his team have managed this issue exceptionally well, and have shown they will fight this aggressively.”
In other words, “come and get me, coppers!” is a more politically effective response than anything expressing contrition or an openness to a slap on the wrist.
Now this has to be deeply frustrating to other candidates seeking 2016 traction who don’t have the credential of being threatened with imprisonment. Consider Bobby Jindal, who’s tried every stunt imaginable to get whipped-up Con-Con activists interested in his presidential availability. As it happens, Bobby was just handed a judicial setback by a state judge who issued an injunction to block Jindal from killing implementation of Common Core education standards in Louisiana–he was the state’s premier Common Core supporter until he became its premier opponent, of course–pending a trial. You have to wonder if Bobby’s brain trust has discussed ways to secure a contempt of court charge to spice things up–you know, the governor entering the courtroom brandishing a Bible and shrieking “Get thee behind me, Satan!” at the judge or something. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 21, 2014
“Fat Chance!”: Chris Christie Admits He Ignored The Law To Help Tesla. Do Republicans Want To Sue Him, Too?
After initially threatening to sue President Barack Obama over a variety of issues, House Speaker John Boehner settled on just one: the delay of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate. The legality of that action, as law school professor Nicholas Bagley has pointed out, is questionable. But the lawsuit also implies that the executive branch should have limited discretion in implementing laws. And Republicans only have to look toward Governor Chris Christie to show how that doesn’t make much sense.
In 2013, Obama delayed for a year the employer mandate, which requires all businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health insurance to their employees or pay a penalty. Infuriated, Republicans called the president’s unilateral action illegal. On this count, they may be right. But it will be nearly impossible for Boehner to convince the courts that the House has suffered concrete damage that gives them the constitutional authority to challenge the action. In all likelihood, the lawsuit is meaningless.
However, this case has implications beyond its legal importance. Simon Lazarus, the senior counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, testified on Wednesday before the House Rules Committee about the historic discretion afforded presidents to implement laws.
“The Administration has not postponed the employer mandate out of policy opposition to the ACA, nor to any specific provision of it,” he said, according to his prepared remarks. “It is ludicrous to suggest otherwise, and at best misleading to characterize the action as a ‘refusal to enforce’ at all. Rather, the President has authorized a minor temporary course correction regarding individual ACA provisions, necessary in his Administration’s judgment to faithfully execute the overall statute, other related laws, and the purposes of the ACA’s framers.” The key is that Obama delayed the employer mandate in order to prioritize the success of the entire law. It does not fundamentally change the legislation or attempt to undermine it.
Lazarus also gave examples when former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton used their discretion in implementing legislation. Bush, for instance, delayed certain EPA regulations not out of technical need, but because he opposed the policies. That is a much graver offense than delaying part of the law in order to increase the chances of its success. The Bush administration actively tried to undermine it. “Such intentional refusals to enforce or implement laws … do violate the laws in question, and are, by definition, failures to faithfully execute the laws as required by the Constitution,” Lazarus said.
Christie used discretion similarly in a decision regarding Tesla’s ability to sell directly to its customers. Under New Jersey statute, direct sales of automobiles are illegal. Christie opposes that law, but must enforce it—except, as he told CNBC’s John Harwood Wednesday, he gave Tesla a one-year grace period.
“The fact is we looked the other way for a year, to allow Tesla to do what they are doing,” he said. “I can’t just pick and choose the laws to enforce. So I give [sic] them what I felt was a reasonable period of time to operate the way they were operating.”
After a year, Christie believed that he had to enforce the law—and Republicans around the country freaked out. A.J. Delgado, of the National Review, questioned Christie’s commitment to the free market. “[Y]ou’d expect Christie, who claims to believe in free markets, to recognize a protectionist swindle, as he did when he took on the state’s powerful public-school teacher unions,” he wrote.
Legally, Christie’s selective enforcement on the ban on direct automobile sales might be more justifiable than Obama’s delay of the employer mandate. Executives frequently prioritize certain laws based on their limited resources. Obama defied a specific deadline in the law. But the functional implications of them are the same. Christie and Obama both used their discretion in enforcing laws to improve their administration’s governance. For Obama, that meant delaying the employer mandate to ease the implementation of Obamacare. For Christie, it meant giving Tesla a year-long reprieve from the direct-sales ban to give the legislature time to change the law.
That’s not to say that executives should have unlimited authority to adjust legislation. But they should be able to use discretion in implementing laws so that they have the greatest chance of success. The House’s lawsuit threatens to eliminate that discretion.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, July 17, 2014
“Nowhere To Hide”: Chris Christie Suddenly Suffers The Unbearable Specificity Of Running For President
Chris Christie went to Iowa this week, bringing what reporters inevitably call his “trademark New Jersey style” to the heartland, where he could mix and mingle with the small number of Republican voters who have the power, a year and a half hence, to either elevate him or crush his White House dreams. And in the process he got an education in what running for president means. While we often describe candidates as having to “move to the right” in the primaries (or to the left for Democrats), what actually happens is often not a move to the edge, but a descent from the general to the specific.
And in practice, that can mean much the same thing. Here’s a report from one of Christie’s events:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Thursday that he backs the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, after declining to give an opinion on the outcome of the case earlier this month.
Christie voiced his support in response to a question from an attendee at a meet-and-greet event in Marion, Iowa, where Christie was campaigning for Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R). The Democratic research super PAC American Bridge caught the exchange on video.
“Do I support the Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case? I do,” Christie said, according to the video posted by American Bridge.
“Do you support Hobby Lobby’s position on birth control for its employees?” the attendee pressed.
“Well I just said I support the case, so if I support the case and they support the Hobby Lobby–” Christie said before moving on to greet other attendees.
If you’re a governor, you can dodge questions for long periods simply because you don’t have to answer that many of them. I don’t know how often Christie does a press conference, but it’s not that frequent. And when he goes out to do events around his state, people are going to ask him about whatever local issues they’re concerned about. He doesn’t need a well-considered position on every national issue that comes up.
But once you go to Iowa to meet with people who are only thinking of you as a presidential candidate, not only do you have to answer more questions, they come at you in contexts like a Des Moines living room or a Sioux City diner. Unlike when you’re giving a press conference, you can’t say, “That’s all the time we have today, folks” and walk out. If you don’t answer to someone’s satisfaction, they’re going to keep pressing you until you do, and you might just lose them. Back a zillion years ago when I was working on a presidential campaign, I gave one voter a compelling argument for why he should vote for my candidate, and he replied that though I made some sense, a few weeks before he went to an event with my candidate, and he had a question for him but never got the chance to ask it, so he was voting for somebody else. I wanted to throttle the guy.
So not only do you have to answer more questions, those questions come with follow-ups, and the activist voters you’re hoping to win over at this stage aren’t going to accept “Well, it’s complicated” as an answer on anything. So candidates have to come out clearly in favor of something like the Hobby Lobby ruling—absolutely non-negotiable with the Republican base, but broadly unpopular with the general public.
What that means is that “moving to the right” is produced by the practicalities of running in a retail election, where voters in some places (two states in particular) want to stick their finger in your chest and take the measure of you before they’ll deign to bestow their vote up on you. In that context, there’s nowhere to hide.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 18, 2014
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