Does anybody ride trains anymore, besides local commutes and subways?...................
I oppose any taxpayer money going to sanctuary cities!!!
Why doesn’t every man, woman and child in the US just pull $2 out of their pocket and send it to CA. Oh wait, we just did.
I can’t say I agree with President Trump on this.
WTF? PRyno and the House approves?
Why? San Francisco is not going to do Trump any favors, he should either not spend the money at all, (Federal Budget everybody!) or he should send it to people who do not detest him.
No!
mostly a big waste of tax money
the regular trains run just fine between Gilroy, San Jose, Palo Alto, and San Francisco etc.
Electrification has a few benefits but hardly’s worth the expense.
As can be discerned from the article (and is very very well known in CA), electrification of the existing train is a disguise, sneaky way to suck a big chunk of taxpayer funds for the useless, stupid, silly “train to nowhere” that Governor Brown’s been pushing on California’s citizens.
It’s a stupid project but the ‘train to nowhere’ thing is just as much fake news as anything about Russia and President Trump.
California’s HSR project is being built in the rural areas first for the same reasons that Interstate highways were all built in the rural areas first. If they don’t do it this way then the city politicians will finance the system in their cities and never pay for the connecting sections.
It’s for the Caltrain commuter system that serves the towns (and the city of San Jose) to the south of San Francisco.
Since I don’t think California should fund the bullet train, I don’t think the federal government should fund this, but allegedly funding is required by current federal law.
I think California should just use overnight sleeper train service between LA and SF.
I would never use the high-speed train.
Overnight bus service is what I used when I traveled between SF and LA (and LA and Sacramento).
Someone tell Trump to stop this boondoggle for Pelosi.
This looks like we are rewarding the Bay Area for creating a sanctuary for illegal aliens—if you fund it you get more of it.... :-(
Why, why, why? Maybe it’s to pack more people in there so when the big earthquake comes, fewer survive. Let’s hope so.
Which one is fake news?
Why fund a sanctuary city? What is going on, thought Trump said this would stop. This is NEW funding, thus, should carry out his promise.
Absolutely disappointing. Gov. Jerry Moonbeam Brown was blasting the Feds a couple months ago, saying California could go its own way and not rely on Federal money. Brown even said California could build its own satellites. Well, they can't build their own trains. After blasting Wash DC and President Trump, Gov Brown went begging for $650 million for the train project. President Trump should have tied it to ending sanctuary status for illegals.
Truth is, the electrification of the trains was unnecessary. CalTrain was already operating highly efficient hybrid trains that use electric motors, the electrical power provided by onboard diesel engines. In other words, the train was already an electric train. The real story is that Brown's high-speed train wants to share the same rail right-of-way as the CalTrain line, so Brown saw the electrification project as a way to achieve his high-speed project. All the money is going into creating rail infrastructure to handle the high-speed trains.
A huge waste of money all around, done with lies by Gov Brown.
Different train project. The “high speed” project is the train to nowhere one.
| Bay Area Rapid Transit: | BART |
| Bay Area Train System: | BATS |
| Phoenix Area Rapid Transit: | PHART |
Noting that I voted for Trump and do not regret doing so, please consider the following.
Regardless of Trump’s good intentions for the country, as a consequence of constitutionally low-information Trump surrounding himself with advisors who probably don’t know the fed’s constitutionally limited powers any better than he does, Trump is still unsurprisingly clueless that the feds have no constitutional authority to tax and spend for infrastructure like train systems. This is evidenced by the following clarifications of Congress’s limited power to tax and spend by previous generations of state sovereignty-respecting Supreme Court justices.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
In fact, and with all due respect to the family, friends and supporters of the late President Eisenhower, Eisenhower was likewise clueless that the states have never expressionally constitutionally delegated to the feds the specific power to establish a national highway system.
This is evidenced by the following excerpt from the writings of President Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson indicating that the states would first have to expressly constitutionally delegate to the feds the specific power to regulate, tax and spend for a national highway — something that the states have never done.
"On a few articles of more general and necessary use, the suppression in due season will doubtless be right, but the great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers [emphases added]”—Thomas Jefferson : Sixth Annual Message to Congress
In fact, President James Madison later vetoed the public works bill of 1817, complementing Jefferson’s words by pointing out that, regardless of politically correct (my term) interpretations of the Common Defense and General Welfare Clause (1.8.1), other than the post roads clause (1.8.7), there are no clauses in Congress’s constitutional Article I Section 8-limited powers that gave Congress the specific power to tax and spend to build roads and canals.
Veto of federal public works bill
In other words, Eisnhower needed to first successfully petition the states for a national interstate highway amendment to the Constitutional before building one imo.
So at this point in time, misguided Trump is inadvertently helping to unconstitutionally expand the already unconstitutionally big federal government’s powers like Eisenhower did imo.
Roy Riegels wrong way run in the Rose Bowl
Actually it’s a different train, the commuter train between SF and San Jose. It’s a line that’s actually full a lot of the time. Of course the diesels work fine. But Trump shares the liberal love of trains.