Christie’s Grit

A report in today’s print edition of the Courier News provided a disheartening update on the bureaucratic mini-controversy caused by the lack of road salt in The Garden State. 

The problem was easily solvable:

(Screen Shot/Dick Bergeron)

 

 

There are 40,000 tons of salt purchased by the New Jersey Department of Transportation.  Yet all of it is still sitting in Searsport, Maine, ready to ship out.   

But that won’t happen thanks to the intransigence of some un-civil servant bureaucrats sitting securely in the offices of Homeland Security and those of the Transportation Department in Washington, D.C. – they enjoy saying no, you can’t have it.

According to the newspaper report by Larry Higgs, it would have been here by now, but officials in D.C. have refused to grant an exemption to the Jones Act.  That legislation prohibits cargo ships which don’t sail under the U.S. flag from carrying goods from one American port to another.

That law was enacted in 1920 mainly as a measure to protect American maritime jobs.  Exemptions are only granted in times of national emergency.  The Anastasia S. which isn’t registered in the U.S. was ready to sail with that salt.

Apparently, the potential for serious injuries and deaths on New Jersey roads battered by the recent spate of severe winter storms is not considered serious enough to grant this state a waiver.

There was a time when Governor Chris Christie would have picked up the phone and rubbed some of his grit on the unfeeling skins of the bench warmers in Washington.  And the salt would have arrived.

But those days are gone – at least for now.  Christie can’t afford to waste his time and political capital on this issue while powerful screaming-meemies in Trenton are hounding him in their efforts to neuter him politically. 

I once sat in the Wade Building of the Bridgewater-Raritan Board of Education as school officials explained why they were dropping a course in civics – not enough interest, they said.  That was a loss – not a good idea, I thought.

But then again, perhaps I was wrong.  All New Jersey students have to do is to check out the organized attempts at maiming Christie, and they will understand what a real civics lesson is:  Whack your opponent, and whack him hard.  Make sure he doesn’t get up again, and the reins of power are back in your hands.

What I observed this afternoon during Chris Christie’s televised annual budget presentation is a man who loves New Jersey, the state in which he was born, raised and lives in.  The guy sincerely wants to fix the long-standing structural problems of over-spending and borrowing that have plagued countless New Jersey state budgets.

It took a lot of grit for the governor to succeed in forging the practical, yet very fragile political coalitions which enabled him and the legislature to begin reversing New Jersey’s perilous fiscal trajectory by enacting into law serious reforms;  but, in Christie’s own words today, it is only a start.

I hope the man does not lose that grit.

Thanks for reading.