Spanking The Nanny State
LINDBERG, TOD
Spanking the Nanny State by Tod Lindberg The tax cuts may be in peril, the line-item veto languishing, welfare reform at a stalemate, and the unzeroed-out National Endowment for the Arts busily...
...Other states, though not all, will soon surely follow suit and raise their limits...
...This is the nanny state hitting the open road...
...Give the Republican Revolution another couple of years, and the scourge of the metric system might actually be banished forever...
...Best of all, perhaps, from the GOP revolutionary's point of view, the hated Clinton administration had long professed its opposition to the measure...
...Best of all, it is no longer mandatory to designate distances on highway signs in kilometers as well as miles...
...There is not much of anything in Montana-even Montanans concede this-and what's there is far from everything else...
...States no longer have to recycle rubber from old tires into the mix used for highways, a ridiculous piece of pork-barrelage passed to satisfy a well-connected recycler in Connecticut...
...It's true that when it was in charge, the Democratic congressional leadership effectively blocked any consideration of a repeal of the speed limit-a straightforward coalition-politics payout to the Naderites and other "safety" groups...
...And it's also true that the question of whether or not there should be a national speed limit isn't a bad proxy for the question of whether you are a liberal or a conservative...
...Mike McCurry, the president's spokesman, had said that if the president enjoyed the line-item veto power that Congress professed to want to give him, this is just the sort of measure he would use it to strike...
...In the end, the House voted 313-112 to get rid of the national speed limit...
...Or anything else, for that matter...
...If you oppose doing away with the national limit, thundered proponents, you are saying that state legislatures and departments of transportation are too stupid to do the right thing for their people...
...The total included 93 Democrats, almost half the party's number in the House...
...When the federal law cranking down speeds to 55 miles an hour took effect in 1974, Montana and eight other states-in that chest-puffing style that has become the signature of local officials denouncing the meddlesome federal govuhment-adopted provisions that would cause their old limits to be restored once Washington saw reason or cried "Uncle...
...The president signed the legislation despite McCurry's pious reminder of Bill Clinton's deep concern that it might lead to more highway fatalities...
...Safety and energy conservation, the issues for liberals, are not the issues for conservatives...
...But it's also another lesson in how hard it is to make progress, and on the dicey relationship between principle and legislation, even in these nominally revolutionary times...
...There is other good news in the legislation, whose main purpose was to designate a National Highway System, which in turn freed about $5 billion for highway construction that had been held up since Oct...
...The bill includes a measure that will withhold highway funds from states that do not lower the drunk-driving threshold for those under 21 years old to 0.02 percent (0.1 being typical for adults...
...This only served to remind Republicans of why they haven't yet gotten around to appointing conferees to work out the kinks in line-item veto legislation...
...Now another thing that isn't there is a speed limit, at least not during the day...
...But say this for the 104th Congress: You can drive faster...
...The states' rights rhetoric that accompanied the repeal of the speed limit would warm the cockles of the conservative Republican heart...
...Do the people's bidding, and jam it down the throat of the status-quo administration: This was exactly the revolution some of the most fervent revolutionaries envisioned...
...The Big Sky's the limit in Montana...
...If only welfare reform were so simple...
...1, the deadline Congress gave itself a couple years ago for completing the system...
...Barring a change of heart in the state capitals, that means you can now, or soon will be able to, go 75 in Wyoming, Nevada, and Kansas and 70 in South Dakota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and California...
...States no longer face penalties if they fail to require motorcycle riders to wear helmets...
...Fifteen Democrats joined 50 Republicans to ensure its acceptance by the Senate...
...Individual freedom and an overweening federal government are the issues...
...This is progress, something real for the folks back home...
...The states are apparently not as full of common-sense wisdom on the subject of teenage drinking as they are on speed limits...
...Our long national nightmare is over, in other words...
...No longer that feeling of suspended animation upon slowing down to 55, having spotted a cop...
...Spanking the Nanny State by Tod Lindberg The tax cuts may be in peril, the line-item veto languishing, welfare reform at a stalemate, and the unzeroed-out National Endowment for the Arts busily preparing for its next foray into the bowels of our culture...
...Still, this victory is not much of a model for anything else...
...They're gunning their engines outside of Butte, Montana, just like in the good old days before Arab oil embargoes, disco, national malaise, and the other political and cultural catastrophes of the 1970s...
...More precisely, Washington decided to butt out of the business of setting speed limits on the nation's highways...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 14
