- Donald Trump voices support for investing in high-speed rail
- House Republicans have repeatedly tried to derail California project
- High-speed rail was an early priority for Obama administration
WASHINGTON -- High-speed rail potentially puts Republicans in the House of Representatives and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on different tracks.
While Republican lawmakers used a hearing Thursday to question high-speed rail projects like one underway in California, Trump has urged greater federal investment in fast trains. The divisions could further complicate life for a Trump administration.
“The California project, some have told me, is off the tracks,” Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican, said Thursday, adding that “unfortunately, that project has been in turmoil from almost the beginning,”
Trump, meanwhile, has called for greater federal effort on high-speed rail.
“China and these other countries, they have super-speed trains. We have nothing,” Trump told The Guardian newspaper last year. “This country has nothing. We are like the Third World, but we will get it going and we will do it properly.”
Trump has backed, as well, eminent domain to secure private property for public works, calling it “absolutely . . . a necessity.” In California, its use for the high-speed rail line has angered property owners and GOP lawmakers, among others.
Trump has not made a specific proposal for high-speed rail, while Mica and other GOP critics of the California project maintain support for other spending on rail infrastructure. The transportation politics can quickly get complicated, and sorted out only on a case-by-case basis.
They have trains that go 300 mph. We have trains that go chug, chug, chug, and then they have to stop because the track splits.
~Donald Trump, comparing U.S. and Chinese rail systems
Still, Mica’s skepticism, voiced at a hearing convened by a panel of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, echoes other Republicans who have challenged the project underway in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, California, and Rep. Jeff Denham, a Republican who represents Turlock, California, and is a former chair of the House railroad subcommittee, have repeatedly sought to cut federal spending on what’s ultimately envisioned as a Los Angeles to San Francisco rail network with an estimated $64 billion price tag.
Construction began last year on the initial segment, with the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s latest plan calling for bullet trains connecting rural Kern County and Silicon Valley’s San Jose by 2025.
“Let’s end this project that continues to waste taxpayer dollars,” Denham said last year during debate over an amendment intended to restrict spending.
The Republican-controlled House also approved in 2012 and again two years later Denham’s amendments to cut off federal funds for the California project. In the 2014 vote, 221 Republicans voted to cut the money while only three supported the high-speed rail spending.
