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"This SAFE-TEA bill will give
the Greens control of the nation's highway system. Conservatives on
[the Environment & Public Works Committee, aka E&PW] have not thought that through. It will do to the
nation's vitally important network of highways, exactly what Green
control did to the nation's National Forests. Just as Greens used
power over Federal Lands to shut down the timber industry, close
hundreds of sawmills, kill forest communities, and destroy the forests
through insects, disease and catastrophic fires -- just as the
Greens closed down oil and gas exploration and production in the US
and have halted all new refineries and driven the petroleum industry
out of the U.S., and just as they did to much of the mining industry
-- they are now attempting to do with the nation's highway system.
Obviously it will be a long, slow process -- but this bill and the
introduction of Invasive Species into the highway system at last gives
the Greens the tool to start slowing the highway system and beginning
to shut it down. They will be able to stall almost any project in any
state, requiring more and more and longer and more detailed EISs, and
will be able to go to courts and get injunctions against almost any
highway projects until new studies have been completed and until
mitigation programs have been put into place to offset any real or
imagined "harm" to any particular area the highway impacts.
The highway system money will be used to protect native wildflowers
and small marshes and whatever -- instead of being used to create and
maintain a safe, reliable, rapid network of transportation to keep our
nation and economy secure and growing." - R.J. Smith, Senior
Environmental Scholar, the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
Washington, D.C., May 12, 2005.
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| "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' interests, I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can." - Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative. |
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| "No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor." - Theodore Roosevelt |
