Rebel Congressmen Fight The Good Fight By Slagging Larry Summers

We’re really starting to fall in love with the moxie being displayed by the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee. That probably sounds silly to readers who haven’t been following the drama around the new transportation bill–they would probably assume the transportation committee is a staid and boring body. But these guys are on the right side of a terribly important issue and are waging an audacious and entertaining campaign against powerful opponents. It’s been bubbling along for a while, but got some ink earlier this week in an article in The Hill.

Loathsome Larry

In brief, the dust-up concerns their effort to get a new six-year transportation bill passed this year, establishing much-needed policy reforms and boosting spending on transportation infrastucture (which pretty everyone agrees is necessary.) They are doing it in the face of the administration’s plan to stick with the old crappy bill for at least 18 more months and total passivity from the Senate, aggressively making the sensible argument that at a precarious economic moment delaying the bill will depress public investment. Of course, now time is precisely the time this sort of spending should be expanded in order to create lots of jobs–not to mention moving us toward a more sensible transportation policy at a time when climate and energy concerns are looking dire. Sure, there are questions about how to pay for it–but there always are and solving that problem simply involves sacking up and settling on a way to pay for it.

Facing absurdly long odds, Jim Oberstar and his allies just refuse to shut up (in a good way!). They’re probably going to lose, but they’re insisting on the principles of sensible governance of political horsetrading, and that’s nice to see.

On America’s vast and despoiled political landscape, they are starting to look like a band of principled guerrillas, launching intrepid hit and run attacks on loathsome individuals like Larry Summers. Sure, it’s good theater–but it’s also healthy for democracy.

Here’s a brief run-down of the major players and some of their more noteworthy provocations:

Jim Oberstar: The author of the new bill and chairman of the T&I committee, he’s been very careful about choosing his enemies: he speaks well of Obama and Ray LaHood, but has been going guns blazing at Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Rahm Emanuel. This latter group is out of touch, don’t understand real work, and don’t know much of anything, in fact, according to Obstar. A gallery of his insults:

• Summers has never picked up a shovel.
• The collective contents of Emanuel’s and Summers’s minds are a “goose egg“
• They spend too much time in limousines.
• Boston, will you please, please take Larry Summers back, for heaven’s sake?

One can debate the political wisdom of this approach, but full points for cajones. Especially, we might add, when the GOP has for years been much better at cultivating spirited (and often effective) rebellion within its ranks while the Dems have displayed a rather more bovine temperament.

John Mica: This Florida Republican–the ranking member of the T&I committee–has been similarly outspoken, but also impressively devoted to sound policy principles instead just descending into partisan bomb-throwning. Take, for instance, a press release yesterday in which he called yesterday’s action by the Senate Environment committee–to push aside Oberstar’s new transpo bill and simply extend the old one for 18 months–”a prelude to a national disaster.” And this isn’t just anti-Obama BS — there’s a serious case to made and he’s making it, hitting precisely the same notes as his Dem brothers.

Mica sez: “[The Senate and administration's 18-month extension] has the unintended consequence of closing down nearly every major national infrastructure project for two years at a time when the unemployed are crying out for the opportunity to work. Also lost is the opportunity to craft a transportation reauthorization bill that would speed up infrastructure project delivery times that are now caught up in a morass of red tape.”

Peter DeFazio: Chair of Highways and Transit subcommittee, DeFazio has been unloading on Obama’s advisors– specifically, Summers–since the early days. When the stimulus was being hashed out, DeFazio said on MSNBC that Summers “hates infrastructure” (heh) and raged against the tax cuts in the stimulus that came at the expense of public works investment. Then he proposed funding the new transportation bill with a tiny tax on oil futures contracts that would hit hedge funds and speculators. It’s safe to say that Larry Summers, who was getting paid seven figures by a big hedge fund–DE Shaw–fairly recently, probably was not a fan of the idea (despite the fact that it is a very good idea).

More recently, he suggested to The Hill that Summers et al would rather hand over money to Goldman Sachs than spend it on public investment. (True! But still fairly aggressive.)

We heard a story about the fallout from that outspokeness: That Obama walked up to DeFazio at an event and said rather sternly to him, “Don’t think we’re not keeping score.” And then walked away. (Unconfirmed, we’ll note.) DeFazio owns up to being “a troublemaker,” but jokes with Rachel Maddow that sometimes that’s the only way to get things done.

But are he and his mates getting anything done in this case–or is this an ill-calculated strategy? We shall see.