I was going to push the Rebuilding America Act as both a repair bill as well as a jobs bill. A lot of those jobs are blue collar jobs, which are a big draw for the Republicans. I was also going to push repairs over new construction. There were more than enough potholes, rusty bridges, and leaky dam locks that needed to be fixed. In order to raise the funds and keep this revenue neutral, we wouldn’t raise taxes, but we would increase various fees and tolls and charges. No taxes though, since Republicans hate taxes! In addition, we would index them so they would rise. Four cents a gallon on gasoline when it costs a dollar a gallon is a four percent rate, but if the cost of gas goes up to two dollars a gallon, and the fee remains at four cents, your rate drops in half. Keep the rate the same, so you collect enough to pay for the repairs. Some rates needed to be on gas or diesel, some on tonnage, some on axles, and so forth. Make the drivers and freight companies pay enough to pay for the repairs.
If you have 250 million people in the country, and you need to raise $100 billion for repairs, that works out to $400 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Since kids aren’t driving a whole lot, maybe $1,000 for every driver. Sounds like a lot, but work it backwards. First, the $100 billion won’t be spent in one year, it might be over five or ten years. Second, it will be buried in things like gas and diesel costs, so they only are paying a few pennies a gallon in fuel, or a few quarters on something shipped to them by UPS or Federal Express. They’re much more likely to complain about the road construction than the cost!
What I was also adding to the bill, which tied in with the regulatory reform Rick Santorum was going to push, was cutting down all the regulatory nonsense with infrastructure. I used to run into this all the time when I was with Lefleur Homes on my first shot. For example, the New York Department of Transportation once proposed a plan to widen and repair an important stretch of Route 23 in Oneonta right before the Great Recession started. Mind you, this was a repair to an existing road, not building a new road. A new road would have been an even bigger nightmare!
DOT proposed the rebuild, which took the road from three lanes to five, and changed three stop lights to traffic circles. Then they had to post this all in the paper and wait sixty days for responses. At that point they had to post any changes, wait sixty days, and hold public hearings. After that, make more changes, wait some more, etc. etc. etc. Meanwhile, everybody and their brother was weighing in on this with their lawyers. The local eco-freaks wanted the bridge over the Susquehanna River, the only bridge connecting to a highway for five miles either way, converted into a public park. (Yes, dig up the roadway on a bridge and plant trees in holes in the concrete!) The local shopping mall and Wal-Mart both brought in lawyers and consultants stating that traffic circles in front of their location were a bad idea, and needed to be in front of their competitor. Meanwhile, you had wetlands conservationists suing for an Environmental Impact Study. At the end of the process, the whole thing got shitcanned because the state didn’t have any money anyway. If they did get some money, it all had to start over again. What a clusterfuck!
The Chinese are a lot smarter. If they wanted a road built, they told people to get the fuck out of the way, we’re building a fucking road! It’s not really a stretch to figure out why they were handing us our asses.
Meanwhile, I had to get myself reelected, otherwise all this was for naught. Here’s a helpful little idea, when you’re told to go jump in a lake, do it! Well, sort of, anyway. If there was a dunking booth at a local fair or school fundraiser, I would volunteer. It shows you’re a ‘man of the people’ and, more importantly, that you have a sense of humor. There is, however, the off chance that the school coach will recognize you and line up the high school baseball pitching rotation to throw at the target. It happened at Hereford High, and I swallowed a lot of water that afternoon! It didn’t help that Charlie had scraped up some quarters and was paying them to strike me out! Every time I protested, he’d laugh and cough up another quarter, the little bastard! I chased him down and dunked him in the booth at the end of the day.
It’s not like I ignored that stuff in the off years. People remember that, too. I did, however, do a bit more in an election year. There’s an old saying that all politics is local, and this is the ultimate expression of it. I think a major reason I whipped Andy Stewart back in 1990 was that he pretty much ignored that personal touch. He relied on the fact that he was a Democrat in Maryland, a Democratic state. It was never out of my mind that I was a Republican in that same state, and I needed to do more.
This year I was running against a woman named Catherine Hartwick, who was on the Board of Education for Carroll County. Bud Hawley and Tommy Hoffman had been the best candidates two years ago, and they had spent all their time destroying each other. The Democrats decided to avoid a primary fight this time, and were betting that a woman could beat me. On the surface she had a fair number of things going for her. The Democrats were big favorites of the education business and the unions, and they figured a woman would play better with the woman’s vote, where I had historically done well. She was a MILF, too, which would do well with the men.
Under the surface they had a problem, in that she was a lousy candidate. She had maxed out her capabilities running for the Board of Education, and it must have been a weak slate that year. So far she had managed to piss off the Carroll County Board of Education by telling them they were too weak on the teachers’ union, along with the teacher’s union when she told them they were greedy. Both statements were true, but not exactly helpful. She had a truly God given talent for sticking her feet, both of them, in her mouth, and usually at the worst possible moment.
My job, as the incumbent, was to let her sink herself, without fucking myself over in the process. I needed to concentrate on constituent services back home, let Ms. Hartwick piss off the voters, and make the Contract with America the centerpiece of the national Republican agenda.
If anything, this time around the Contract with America seemed to be an even bigger deal than before, but that was probably because I was involved with it now and it just seemed bigger. I had prevailed upon Newt to bring the Senate in on things, which before he hadn’t. The Senate had weighed in and quite a few Republican Senators were going along with it. Newt had lined up a bunch of Republican Senators who would sponsor the Senate versions of our ten bills. If we took both houses, we could slam all ten through and dare Bill Clinton to veto them all. He would veto some of them, but if we had enough votes, we could override him.
Don Nickles, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, had volunteered to sponsor the Senate version of the Defending the Second Amendment Act. He was definitely to the right of me on a bunch of issues, and this was one of my more right wing stands. John Danforth of Missouri was writing the Senate version of the Rebuilding America Act; he had been the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation prior to the Democrats taking the Senate in the ’86 elections. He was actually a fairly moderate Republican, and although he was happy enough to go along with infrastructure improvements, he told me privately that some of what we were trying to do he didn’t like. He wouldn’t be voting for some of the bills in the Contract. He also warned me that this bill was going to be a major magnet for every Congressman and Senator with a taste for pork in his budget.
Maybe if we passed a line item veto, we could shave some of that pork out. That was up to John Boehner in his bill. We’d have to see.