Attack on Rep. Steven Scalise, Republicans was a hate crime
The nation has a huge backlog of infrastructure needs, and Donald Trump wants to tackle them with a $1 trillion program. The president would like to deploy $200 billion in federal money to leverage private investment and state and local funds. It’s a promising idea that could improve our transportation system while generating blue-collar jobs in places that have lost them. But as Barack Obama could attest, it’s harder than it sounds.
In February 2009, Obama signed an $831 billion economic stimulus that included more than $100 billion for infrastructure projects. Shortly before taking office, he had said, “I think we can get a lot of work done fast. When I met with the governors, all of them have projects that are shovel-ready, that are going to require us to get the money out the door, but they’ve already lined up the projects and they can make them work.”
It seemed to be just what the doctor ordered for a sick economy. But getting the prescription filled was another story.
“Many of the road, bridge and sewer projects financed by the record-breaking spending bill took more than a year to even start construction as they got bogged down in bureaucratic red tape at the local level,” The New York Times reported in October 2014. Obama discovered to his dismay that, as he put it, “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”
A new report from the nonpartisan reform group Common Good says there is a reason for that: impenetrable tangles of red tape that make it impossible for big public works to get done promptly. “Even projects to repair or update existing infrastructure require years of process from multiple agencies,” it says. “Decisions on new infrastructure, such as solar fields, wind farms and transmission lines, sometimes require a decade for approval.” A desalination plant in San Diego took 14 years.
The problem is that many parties have the capacity to stall a project, and no one has the capacity to move it forward quickly. Multiple permits are “an accident of the growth of government,” notes Common Good. “No one stopped to consider the implications of giving veto authority to any one of dozens of government departments.”
Individual steps have also gotten steeper. Environmental impact statements originally required only about 10 pages. Today, they often run 300. One for the Bayonne Bridge in New York City, which was a mere refurbishment of an old asset, filled 10,000 pages. Lawsuits are used by opponents both for delay and for leverage.
Gary Cohn, director of Trump’s National Economic Council, says the administration would like to slash permitting times from up to 10 years to no more than two. He explained recently, “The cost of infrastructure goes up dramatically as time goes on in the approval process, capital is tied up, it has people waiting for permits, and the amount of paperwork and the amount of fees that you just encumbered while you’re going through the approval process is enormous.”
The administration says that as many as 16 federal agencies have a say in highway permits. Then there are state and local officials to contend with. But these officials and the people they serve lose when endless obstruction leaves public needs unmet.
We’ve learned the perils of giving everyone the power to say no. A simpler, streamlined process, of the sort Cohn suggests, would make it easier to get to yes. Even Barack Obama might agree. From Bloomberg View
WRJ Matson, Roll Call
ith its 98-2 vote to expand sanctions against Russia, the U.S. Senate has effectively served notice on two great powers in Washington: Russia, which may have to face new costs for its meddling in the 2016 U.S. election; and President Donald Trump, who will have to contend with congressional input on U.S. policy toward Russia.
The bill, which also strengthens penalties against Iran, would put into law sanctions that had been imposed by former President Barack Obama and not allow Trump to ease or lift them without congressional review. It also would allow new sanctions on state-owned entities in Russia, such as those which engage in “malicious cyber activity” or supply weapons to Syria.
At a separate hearing, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signaled the administration’s unhappiness with the impending Senate vote, which he argued would reduce its “flexibility” in reaching out to Russia. But Trump has only himself to blame. Ignoring Russia’s aggressive conduct in Syria, Europe, and Afghanistan — not to mention inside U.S. computer servers — he has pushed for lifting sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Crimea, cyberattacks and human-rights violations. He and members of his administration have dissembled about their contacts with Russia during the campaign and dismissed the steadily expanding investigations into them.
In an alternate universe — one in which someone other than Trump were president — pursuing better relations with Russia might make sense. Sanctions are best used sparingly, in concert with other nations and with a clear goal in mind. And while Congress certainly has a constitutional role to play in foreign relations, the ship of state sails most smoothly with one captain, not 535.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin is showing no signs of contrition or reform — and neither, for that matter, is Trump. From the Americas and Europe to the Middle East and Asia, his outbursts and their dissonance with both longstanding U.S. policies and his own cabinet’s pronouncements are worrying allies and creating openings for adversaries. Under these circumstances, the Senate was right to step in.
There is a larger issue at stake as well, beyond Russia or Trump’s relationship with Russia: Congress needs to reassert its prerogatives in foreign policy. In budget hearings, there were hopeful signs. Senators made clear that the administration’s plans to downgrade the promotion of democracy and the provision of humanitarian aid — both areas of longstanding U.S. leadership — will face resistance. Congress can also reclaim its constitutional power to declare war by approving a clear authorization for the use of military force against Islamic State.
The lopsided vote in favor of the Senate bill suggests that a basis for a bipartisan policy on Russia still exists. In this polarized age, that’s something on which the president should build.
Ijust got finished writing a column about how the internet is vile and vicious and people have become poisonous vipers in the privacy of their basements. It was in direct reaction to the blowback I received this week to my Bill Cosby essay, which, as my editor noted “broke the internet.”
I think she gives me too much credit, because I have it on good authority that the internet is like the child-proof seal on over-thecounter medicine and can never be broken, but I appreciate the shout-out.
And then, I re-read the column and realized that I’d missed the elephant in the room, the one that was shaking off her baseball gear and gesticulating frantically at me from the corner.
I got tweeted at, vilified and flooded with emails hoping I’d be raped.
But someone else was in intensive care, in critical condition, suffering from a bullet wound that shredded his internal organs.
Several others were also in the hospital, having acted heroically to protect many other people who were in harm’s way in a park in Alexandria, Virginia.
And that column about bruised feelings seemed narrow, narcissistic and just completely tone deaf.
So I started all over again, but not without some understanding of what that first column had in common with this one: the hateful, heated, horrific tone of our current public discourse.
Words did not send a bullet into the body of Rep. Steven Scalise, or the other four people who were wounded Wednesday morning by another in a long line of gunmen.
But we can’t ignore the heavy impact that words have had on our psyches and our conduct, our good intentions and our bad faith, our hopes and our hype, and all the other things that fill our waking hours. Politics is no longer a game for gentlemen and gentle ladies, all gathered to advance the public welfare.
It is now a blood sport, and we saw that quite literally Wednesday morning.
Some will hesitate to connect the rhetoric of the political landscape to the averted massacre in Alexandria, attributing the killer’s motives to mental illness or easy access to guns. That eternal dance of gun control versus Second Amendment rights will continue to play out regardless of how many people are murdered (because if we’re still tripping the light fantastic after kindergartners were murdered before Christmas, we’ll never really learn the necessary lessons).
But I think a big part of what happened this week has to do with the sickness that has begun CHRISTINE M. FLOWERS Dave Granlund, Politicalcartoons.com Mike Lester, Washington Post Writers Group to infect all of us, that truly “viral” cocktail of technology and pathology.
The man who shot Congressman Scalise hated Donald Trump. He made that very clear with his social media imprint, writing things on his Facebook page that I cannot reproduce here without using a large number of symbols, numbers and exclamation points. He was also a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders.
I have nothing but praise for Sen. Sanders. Immediately after the shooting occurred, he emerged on the Senate Floor to condemn the attacks, and showed himself to be first and foremost an American, not a partisan. I do not share his beliefs or his policies, but I think he is one of the finest men in Washington.
But we cannot ignore the fact that the man who made a direct attack on Republican politicians hated Republicans, by his own words and deeds. We can be all Kumbaya about it and try and say that this is irrelevant, and we can also try and count the number of fairies that can dance on the head of a pin, but both would be a waste of time. The man who shot Steve Scalise hated him, because he was a member of the GOP in a government presided over by Donald Trump. It was a hate crime. I say this because I have to, because at every juncture since Donald Trump has been elected, people have been complaining about the rise in hate crimes. When cemeteries were vandalized, it was attributed to “hate,” when swastikas were painted on walls, it was blamed on “hate,” and when young Muslim women’s veils were ripped off of their heads, it was called “hate.”
Never mind that many of the incidents never happened or were fabricated to give the impression of a “hate wave.” We were all willing, so many of us, to believe that the seas of hatred were rising.
Well guess what? Maybe we, so many of us, were right after all. Maybe we have entered a new era of vilification, of poison, of anger and of distrust. Maybe we can stop pretending that mental illness is the problem, or the proliferation of guns, or poverty, or drugs, or whatever other ill has infected the populace. Maybe we ourselves are the problem, we are the infection, we with our harsh and brutal words scattered across the internet miles with impunity.
I would ask Congressman Scalise what he thinks, but he’s unable to answer, just now.