May 23, 2008
U.S. Sovereignty Update
| Host: | Vic Eliason |
| Guest: | Tom DeWeese |
| Listen: | RealAudio | Windows Media | MP3 | Order Tape or CD |
Tom DeWeese is the President of the American Policy Center. He joined Vic Eliason to update listeners on current national policy concerns such as the Trans Texas Corridor, Real ID, illegal immigration, and the Mexican Truck Project.
In the past year, Texas legislators passed a moratorium to stop the Trans-Texas corridor project until they had a chance to talk about it. The moratorium passed both the houses of the Texas legislature by large margins. In spite of that, the Texas governor vetoed the moratorium.
This corridor highway is set to cross the U.S./Mexican border and go through the state of Texas and into Oklahoma. It's a quarter mile wide highway that will have lanes for trucks and cars traveling in both directions, rail lines down the center, oil lines, and more.
One problem with this project is that the Texas Department of Transportation has signed a 50 year lease with a Spanish company called, CENTRA. This lease contains a no-compete clause. This means that no one, not even the state of Texas, can build a competing highway to go in the same direction.
The next problem with the highway involves the Comprehensive Development Agreement. This agreement, or CDA, guarantees CENTRA's return on its investment. This means, for example, that there are no controls over how high toll rates can go.
In spite of Bush denials that the Trans-Texas Corridor doesn't exist, last September the Bush administration began a pilot project to allow Mexican trucks to come across the U.S./Mexican border unchecked. Members of congress began to ask questions about the safety of this move. That's when Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota introduced an amendment to the transportation appropriations bill removing funding for the project. This legislation passed and became a part of the transportation appropriations bill and last December, Bush signed it into law.
Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation decided they weren't going to pay any attention to that and have continued to move forward with this truck project.
A few weeks ago, there was a contentious hearing involving U.S. Transportation Secretary, Mary Peters. Senator Dorgan took her to task on this and what the hearing brought forth is that of the four Mexican companies that are part of the project, 1,700 safety violations were uncovered.
When Peters was grilled on the English proficiency of the Mexican drivers, Senator Dorgan discovered that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is allowing Mexican drivers in the demonstration project to prove their proficiency in English by responding to the questions of examiners in Spanish.
On illegal immigration, politicians on Capitol Hill tried implementing immigration amnesty legislation into an Iraq spending bill but the immigration portion was stripped from the bill yesterday.
The Real ID Act was passed in 2005 in order to fight terrorism and illegal immigration via the use of driver's licenses. Tom feels the act has logistical and philosophical problems. It costs a huge amount of money for fingerprints and retinal scans, aspects of the project that would require the creation of data banks that currently don't exist. Philosophically, this would create a national I.D. that would be necessary in order to get on a plane, obtain government services, buy a gun, get a marriage license, etc. Tom believes that since the government didn't seem to be in a hurry to implement this and hadn't planned on fully doing so until about 2017, Washington must be more interested in a national I.D. program than they are about the threat of terrorism.
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