Editorial: On Stones and Glass Houses
The Virginia Republican is very unhappy because the people who run Congress these days — and who sit on the same side of the aisle as Mr. Wolf — had the audacity to reach into the 4,000-page piece of legislation that details how the government will spend more than $500 billion over the next year, and pluck out his latest brainstorm.
And they did it, in large part, at the request of ATA.
Mr. Wolf is currently on a mission to force the federal government to shift the Office of Motor Carriers out of the Federal Highway Administration and into the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
There’s no way most of us can really judge the merits of his case against OMC, because Mr. Wolf tried to circumvent the established legislative procedure and force this fundamental policy shift by attaching it to the appropriations bill, no doubt in the belief that it would slide by.
As the House Transportation Committee’s chief of staff, Jack Shenendorf, said, Mr. Wolf’s move violated House rules because it represented not a funding issue, but a policy matter. “If it was so important, why didn’t he come to our committee?” asked Mr. Shenendorf. During the panel’s extensive hearings on the highway funding bill, Mr. Wolf’s proposal “was never raised.”
We do know that of all the things that NHTSA is, it isn’t a highway safety enforcement agency. Rather, NHTSA is primarily an engineering office, so why move OMC there, if it’s going to go anywhere?
The congressman said he bent the rules because he “wanted to deal with this as quick as possible.”
ood intentions aren’t good enough. Facts and a vision of how to improve things are what we need before this kind of policy shift occurs. Shooting from the hip, and in the dark, is not good government.
