Thomas Fitzgerald: Shuster uses sales skills for transportation funding

U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster, Republican of Pennsylvania, has car salesman on his pre-House resumé, and the experience proved useful last year when the Republican leadership sent him to try to persuade the most conservative members of the caucus to vote for a massive transportation funding bill.

Of course, the tea party is even tougher than a Blair County farmer trying to shave the sticker price on a new Jeep or Chrysler at the dealership Shuster used to own. So it wasn't easy, but the bill did get through.

Now chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Shuster warned last week against the reflexive opposition to federal spending from some in the GOP House majority during his speech to the Ripon Society, an organization of moderate Republicans.

"The reason we have the Constitution we have today, the breaking point in the Articles of Confederation, was a transportation issue," Shuster said.

As he told it, Maryland and Virginia could not agree on a treaty to pay for improvements to allow navigation of the Potomac River and its tributaries - including a system of canals and roads - through Pennsylvania to the Ohio territory, then the Wild West.

"And as they fell apart in the negotiations, they realized that if we can't promote commerce, if we can't connect ourselves physically, we're never going to be a United States," Shuster said.

Indeed, he said, the federal government has a constitutional responsibility to help pay for improvements to roads, bridges, waterways, and railroads.

Shuster cited Adam Smith, the classical economist who extolled the "invisible hand" of free markets. Smith said "that government should provide three things for the people - security, preserve justice, and it should erect and maintain infrastructure to promote commerce," Shuster told the Ripons.

Apparently that would be the visible hand.

Shuster, whose father, Bud, was House transportation chairman in the 1990s, will again face the internal tension between GOP pragmatists and purists as he tries to craft a funding source (taxes, in other words) for the federal transportation trust fund.

Sound familiar?

On July 1, Gov. Corbett's plan for a $2 billion transportation package to fix the state's tattered roads and bridges and fund mass transit went down in flames in Harrisburg. A core of conservatives in the Pennsylvania House would not budge in their opposition, objecting to money for trains and buses in the cities and, more important, to raising that money via increases in the wholesale gasoline tax and motor-vehicle fees.

State Senate Republicans, traditionally more moderate, had passed the bill. But House Democrats would not provide the votes GOP leaders needed, and the bill died there. Moderate-conservative divisions on liquor privatization also contributed.

State House Majority Whip Stan Saylor (R., York) said he did not blame upstate Republicans for opposing the transportation bill. "If you're sitting in a county that gets no necessary road improvements, why would you put up a tax vote?" Saylor said. "Seriously."

State Sen. Robert Tomlinson (R., Bucks), whose region is congested, took the opposite tack. "You talk about the 'core functions' of government - well, transportation is one of them," he said. "It's an economic issue."

Like navigating the Potomac.