Rep. Kathy Tyler (D-4/Big Stone City) spent a lot of time on the Interstate Highway System last week. She asks us to muse over what GOP hostage-taking tactics might have done to our great national highway system fifty years ago:
...what would have happened if either party would have said in 1964, “We’ll work on the budget when you defund the Federal-Aid Highway Act. The roads aren’t going where we want them to go.” Never mind that the plans had been voted on and passed. Think of your own situation: you plan a major project; it’s approved. Half-way through, a group kidnaps the project for ransom. There has been plenty of time for discussion, but this way sends a huge message. I haven’t decided what the message is necessarily, but evidently there is one [Rep. Kathy Tyler, "The Interstate and the Affordable Care Act," Kathy's Corner, 2013.10.07].
Rep. Tyler comes back to 2013 (and to South Dakota, safely, on that grand concrete product of socialism) and notes that the Affordable Care Act is as much law and reality now as President Eisenhower's Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. She accurately contends that our main question in addressing the partial government shutdown should not be whether we approve of the ACA:
The question is does any party have the right to shut down the United States government—to hold it hostage? I think not. Somewhere along the line, people need to put their dander down and start talking. I have an idea: each party select three top economists, tax experts, whomever (I like expert opinion); three people from each party, and a budget person or two. Put them in a room with the assignment to find the way to balance the budget with the caveat that it will be passed by Congress. But that would take trust…and I think we’ve lost that [Tyler, 2013.10.07].
Do we want to trust each other and solve problems, or do we want to end up as Weimar America?