A Tale of Two Bridges

Deroy Murdock brings us this article about the now famous "Bridge to Nowhere." Critics have come up with the rather strange claim that Sarah Palin did not really kill this particular pork project. Mr. Murdock brings us the details and shows that, in fact, the McCain people have got it right. Moreover, we find that Obama not only voted for the pork project, but did so at the expense of Katrina victims.

Obama and Biden had an excellent opportunity to do the right thing. Just seven weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Senator Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) proposed to transfer $125 million from the notorious Bridge’s budget and instead devote it to rebuilding the Interstate 10 Twin Spans Bridge between New Orleans and St. Tammany’s Parish. The storm chopped up the bridge.

“We have the largest natural catastrophe we have ever seen in our history,” Coburn said on the Senate floor on October 20, 2005. “It is time we reassess the priorities we utilize in this body as we think about our obligations at home.”

Coburn’s amendment failed 15-82. Obama and Biden were among the “nays.” They and 80 other senators preferred to protect the earmarking tradition than to assist Katrina’s tempest-tossed citizens.

Obama and Biden put pork first and people second. While the residents of New Orleans and southern Louisiana endured perhaps their greatest challenge since the Civil War, Obama and Biden both turned their backs on these embattled Americans.

Katrina demolished much of the city of Slidell, home to Nan Eitel, a formerly New Orleans-based attorney who relocated with her family to Washington, D.C. after the storm. The Twin Spans Bridge was “the route I used to take to work every day,” she recalls by phone. When Eitel learned Monday that Obama and Biden helped junk Coburn’s plan to rebuild the bridge she traveled every weekday morning and evening for 14 years, she says, “I was stunned. That bridge is critical to the economy of the greater New Orleans region.” She explains that it connected Slidell’s bedroom community with downtown New Orleans. She says it served “many people who worked in the oil and gas industry and the Michoud, Louisiana facility where the Space Shuttle’s rockets are built.”

Eitel says that Obama and Biden’s votes “showed a tremendous lack of understanding for that community and the bridge’s importance to the reconstruction effort.” While other routes connected New Orleans to the north and west, the ruined Twin Spans Bridge left it isolated from points east. “Without the bridge, you couldn’t get the city rebuilt,” Eitel says. “Without it, you could not bring in building supplies. Without it you could not truck in the water and food that people needed.”

The Twin Spans Bridge is being rebuilt, though without the help that Coburn tried to provide and Obama and Biden helped block.