Amtrak's for-profit regulation George Will
In 1906, Leonor Loree, an accomplished railroad executive, examined the dilapidated Kansas City Southern Railroad that he had been hired to rehabilitate. Dismayed, he permanently enriched American slang by exclaiming: "This is a helluva way to run a railroad!" Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the nation’s second-most important court, recently said, with judicial decorousness, essentially the same thing about Amtrak.
She was not referring to its 46 consecutive years of operating losses, which include $306 million last year, and more than $16 billion since 1970, when Congress created Amtrak as a federally chartered, for-profit corporation. Rather, Brown was referring to how Congress, by piling "anomaly on top of anomaly," has made Amtrak into a "wholly unique statutory creature" — one empowered to regulate its competitors. Amtrak illustrates the administrative state’s routine drift into constitutional impropriety.
In 2008, Congress passed the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act (PRIIA), which endowed Amtrak with the powers of a regulatory agency that makes decisions, in conjunction with the Transportation Department, about scheduling, uses of available tracks, maintenance and other metrics and standards that compel certain behavior by the entire U.S. rail industry. Freight rail entities, which actually are private, understandably objected, and the D.C. Circuit agreed with them that PRIIA was an unconstitutional delegation of governmental regulatory power to a private entity.
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http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will051216.php3#u3mORX2MQzapb1CT.99
Good read. Great examples of government double speak, incompetence, and corruption on wheels.
