I was reading this piece last night, which, contrary to what its title promised, only seemed to focus on the passage of the Rail Safety Act. The bill was praised in the media for its bipartisanship: There’s notable harmony on this issue between Ohio Senators Sherrod Brown (D.) and J. D. Vance (R.). It got me thinking about the politics of how this bill came about.
Legislators can be excused for reacting swiftly when tragedy hits their state. Such was the case when a train was derailed in Ohio in February, yielding a black plume of smoke and unleashing a unique bout of hysteria.
After the tragedy, Vance was quick on the scene, wise to the fact that the affected area overwhelmingly supports Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, who added to the political theatrics when he too visited the town of East Palestine.
Yet, as things go in Washington, once the attention dwindled, the policy-making began. While Vance was a clear architect of the legislation as an original cosponsor, the imprint of Vance’s colleague from Ohio Sherrod Brown, a well-known labor loyalist who is running for reelection in increasingly red Ohio, is clear.
The result: the Rail Safety Act is littered with unrelated labor policies that should make even the most ardent populists in the GOP blush. As National Review‘s editorial board notes:
It incorporates policy recommendations from Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg that are not germane to the East Palestine accident, grants the secretary’s office broad new powers to regulate the rail sector, and includes sops to organized labor. A number of unions, which are obviously close to Brown, instantly endorsed the bill.
The most glaring issue is a provision to freeze current staffing levels. “Minimum crew requirements have been a priority of labor unions that seek to protect unionized jobs, but this will come at a cost to rail operation, which would incentivize more goods being transported by truck,” says the R Street Institute. I have written about this here.
As noted in a new paper, Brown and Vance also seek to create a new jobs bureau without any demonstrable benefit to rail safety. Pay no mind if farmers, who opposed the original bill and have not endorsed the substitute amendment that cleared committee, must move their products more slowly and at higher cost.
As always, Dominic Pino has done a great job exposing all that is wrong with this bill. The bottom line is that the rail-“safety” debate in the Senate perfectly reflects the failures of shallow populism among new-age Republicans and puts in plain view their misunderstanding of legislating.
All this raises the following question: Since the policy is massively flawed, why would other Republican senators — right now there are seven who have signed on, while eleven voted no in committee — help Brown, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the very labor unions that spend millions to defeat them? The question becomes even more puzzling when you consider that the House seems committed to a narrower policy, which does not involve excessive government involvement following a single train derailment.
Vance could have been at the forefront of a congressional charge to improve rail safety and shown his new constituents that he is a credible legislator. Instead, he got played by Brown, who’s getting everything he wants and more in exchange for nothing he didn’t want and hardly any rail safety to boot. Hopefully, the rest of the Republican minority will recognize this for what it is: a protection racket for labor-union leaders who’ll help reelect Sherrod Brown.
This post has been modified to clarify the bill’s legislative process.