On the recordJune 26, 2012
I will just make three quick points. One is, again, it is really odd that here I stand with you next to the microphone and that I am actually defending the more conservative position and actually defending the position of the President of the United States, who says we should be spending less money. Secondly, in a time when we all said, Let's eliminate earmarks, here we have, as Heritage says, the largest earmark in American history. Because this is not simply an issue of saying that this program has a safety need and no one else does. If it wasn't a grant application process where New York, New Jersey, or any other system around the country could have applied and say, Our safety needs are X times high or less than Washington, D.C., maybe there wouldn't be a concern. But that's not the case here. All the other metropolitan transit systems in the country aren't being weighed as far as what their safety needs or what their maintenance needs are. It just simply made a decision here that Washington, D.C., and the congressional districts that it contains around it somehow or another merit greater service than do the other ones in Chicago or New York or New Jersey, what have you. I think that's where the difficulty lies.
