Amtrak
AMTRAK -- (House of Representatives - March 09, 2005)
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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding and for her kind words. Yes, I have been on this committee for 14 years, and I am very pleased to see the gentlewoman become the new leader of the Subcommittee on Railroads and already, in this and other ways, is offering excellent leadership. The gentlewoman is going to be tested, because she faces a crisis like no Chair of that committee has faced, with possible loss all together of Amtrak; and I congratulate her for taking hold and having no fear, but then the gentlewoman is known to be fearless.
Mr. Speaker, it is unthinkable that in the post-9/11 era we are leaving large parts of our country with little or no transportation. It began with the airlines, deregulation in the 1980s and, in order to accomplish that, some good things came from it, but some not-so-good things came from it, because they had to pull out of many markets that are not unprofitable, given the deregulation. Even before 9/11, all the airlines were, as it were, in the hospital. Every last one of them, union controlled or not, of large airlines is now in intensive care, to be polite about how badly off they are. So much for the airlines already not serving huge blocks of the country.
West Coast communities and communities in the South are now up in arms as Greyhound is about to pull out of those communities. Because when the Federal Government took over Amtrak, we closed down half of Amtrak. So all they had was Greyhound, and now Greyhound is gone. Yet, I am on the Select Committee on Homeland Security working on security. It looks like there is no way to get out of many communities in the United States of America.
As the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Corrine Brown) knows, we just passed a major transportation bill, finally. Yet, we are systematically starving transportation in our country, and if I can say that about bus and airlines because, after all, they are subsidized.
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Ms. NORTON. Well, I thank the gentlewoman, and I thank her for reminding us that we have not even passed this bill yet; we are supposed to get to that tomorrow. And we are 17 months late in passing this, and there is much to complain about with this bill. Even though the buses have dedicated funding through the highways and the airlines have dedicated funding through the airports, there is no dedicated funding for rail. How did rail get left out?
We are trying to be a great power on the cheap, because I never heard of a great power that did not have first-class rail service. We understand that apparently about airlines; that is why we subsidize the airlines. Particularly in the post-9/11 era, I can tell my colleagues that after the terrible tragedy at the Pentagon, there was really only one way to get out of the District of Columbia. They closed Reagan National Airport for 2 weeks. I do not know how the gentlewoman got home to Jacksonville, because she sure did not get home out of this jurisdiction.
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Ms. NORTON. The gentlewoman has documented the point I think dramatically, even involving the Members of this body. We cannot afford to leave major cities of the United States dependent on one form of transportation. That is how the Capital of the United States was left. We just heard the gentlewoman from Florida talk about New York being left in the same way. Who would, as the gentlewoman says, want to even risk that?
We are not alone, Madam Chair. Under the gentlewoman's leadership, we are already seeing action in the other body. I was pleased to see that Senator Conrad BURNS all the way out in Montana is talking about Amtrak and about saving Amtrak. Six Republicans have already joined him. There is going to be a huge bipartisan effort here. I think we are going to be successful, because there is no recourse. There is no alternative to making sure that we have a national railroad.
The worst part of what the administration is doing is trying to deliberately force Amtrak into bankruptcy.
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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for making that point, because I hope we do not have to lose it before people understand how much they need it. The notion of bankruptcy, well, there is a bankruptcy of policy, if bankruptcy is all one can think about for a public service that the country cannot do without.
We know that bankruptcy has not done anything for the airlines. We have had several airlines go into bankruptcy. They go, they come out, but because they are a public service, they have to go a certain number of places. And guess what? They need some kind of subsidy, and they certainly have gotten some, even though we have required them to operate as businesses.
We used to require the railroads to operate as businesses; but beginning in 1971, the Congress understood that the business model did not work for railroads. It does not work for railroads anywhere in the United States. Yet that is what we have here: bankruptcy. Because policy is being determined by ideology, the ideology that says that if the private sector cannot do it, then maybe we do not need it, and that is why the gentlewoman's point is so important.
Somebody needs to get up and tell the Congress and tell the administration that they do need it. It is not ideology that should decide whether the Nation is going to have railroads; it is old fashioned American pragmatism. We took them over, eliminating half of the lines in 1971, because the private sector said, hey, there is no profit in this. What makes us think there is profit in it now, when even we do not want to give a subsidy that would be required of us as a public body.
I want to alert Members here. They may think that we are talking about the Amtrak that they see here every day; you know, the Amtrak that goes to Pennsylvania Railroad, the Amtrak of Union Station. I am talking about the Amtrak that exists in 46 States, I say to the gentlewoman. That is the Amtrak I am talking about. The Amtrak that affects each and every Member of the House and Senate. I think we ought to alert Members what we are really talking about. We are talking about the national network that we call Amtrak that, in fact, serves the entire United States. If Amtrak were an airline, it would be the eighth largest airline in the United States.
The thing that most gets me about what it is that the administration apparently says it wants to do, and here I am quoting what Secretary Norm Mineta said when the President's budget came over here, that they want to change funding responsibilities to the States on a 50-50 match. Give me a break. Hey, if the Federal Government cannot stand these costs, are we serious that the States, which are now facing huge Medicaid costs, huge shifts of the Federal budget to them, huge effects of the tax cuts, are going to now be able to pick up Amtrak and keep it going?
This is a scandal and a scandal that we must break before it goes any further. If they think that this is like the ordinary bankruptcy where a company comes in and picks up the pieces on the cheap, yes, you can pick up the pieces on the cheap, but can you run a railroad. I think what we now know is that you cannot run a railroad without subsidy.
We will not be the first country in the world to run it without subsidy, and the reason they talk about 50-50 with the States is they know that the private sector cannot run it without a subsidy, so they want to shift the costs of the subsidy to the private sector. Watch out, everybody in the House. They are coming your way, and we have to keep the costs where the tax base is broadest, here in the House, not on the tax bases of each and every State which are having a hard enough time keeping their own transportation going.
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Ms. NORTON. I think that is an awfully important point to make. With that supermajority it does not seem to me that the administration can succeed in eliminating Amtrak if we do our work here in the Congress. They talk about leaving the commuter rail lines there. Well, it is interesting to hear the railroad administration say that they are unable and unqualified to help operate those rail lines. I am not sure what the administration is after there. Of course, those are the parts of Amtrak that people use to get back and forth to work.
This is not very well thought out. It seems to me, if you took about 5 minutes thinking about it, you would have to come up with another solution. In fact, let us assume that I think the best way to come to grips with what the administration is seeking to do, let us assume that they got their way and somehow or another they went into bankruptcy and some company came and picked it up on the cheap, nothing resembling the present coverage could possibly survive. I mean, some private person, because you have a bottom line, you have stockholders, would do what you got to do, and he would pick off the most profitable, there is a tiny part that is profitable maybe between Boston and New York and say, the rest of you are on your own. You would have one corridor or so railroad. Nothing resembling the kind of coverage that we have now would be possible.
I do want to point out something because as a lawyer, I got interested when I learned something from my staff. I said, wait a minute, I have to look into this. There are so many impossible missions we have given Amtrak. They have modernized and done a very good job of doing that.
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