When Ideology Trumps Reality.
American cities need public transportation and it needs to be subsidized. Why? To keep fares reasonable so people who don’t make a lot of money can get to their jobs!
This is a simple concept, easily grasped by most of us, but evidently beyond the cognitive capacity of State Senator Bob Hall of Texas.
Last week, he introduced a bill which, if passed into law, would forbid the Texas Department of Transportation—or any city, town or county government in there State of Texas—from using any federal dollars for any “mass transit passenger rail project.”
In addition to reality, this proposed legislation puts Senator Hall in conflict with the cities of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio—and doubtless most other smaller cities and towns—all of which have transit systems and want to expand them.
That, of course, doesn’t matter in the least to these Tea Party devotees because they don’t accept a fundamental truth: modern society is complicated and simplistic crackpot ideologies cannot possibly apply across the board in every circumstance and situation.
There seems to be a lot of that going around, especially in Texas. For example, U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, whose district is a swank suburb of Dallas, proposed an amendment to a bill in the U.S. House last session that would have killed the Sunset Limited, Amtrak’s long-distance train that runs three days a week between Los Angeles and New Orleans. I was surprised, frankly, because the Sunset Limited crosses the entire State of Texas—more than 900 miles, from El Paso in the west to Beaumont in the East, and serving San Antonio and Houston along the way. Perhaps Congressman Sessions would relent if the Sunset Limited stopped in Dallas?
Getting back the Senator Bob Hall for a moment, this guy has also introduced legislation that would prohibit the state or any city or town in Texas from funding any organization, including public universities and colleges, that has been “accredited” by the United Nations. (The U.N., you see, is poised to take over this country and impose godless socialism on us all.)
The thing I find so creepy about Senator Hall and most of the others in the Tea Party crowd is how normal they all look!
