Chris Christie Vindicated on ARC Tunnel Cancellation

posted at 3:23 pm on February 8, 2011 by John Sexton
[ Politicians ]   

Check out this clip of Chris Christie responding to heat he was getting on the ARC tunnel cancellation about two weeks ago:

Why is this news? Because as Daniel Foster at NRO notes, an entire generation has passed us by in three months. Here’s Christie himself responding to news of a new plan by Amtrak to build a tunnel across the Hudson into NYC:

There’s some dispute I’d say about how long a generation actually is, right? People say a generation, how long that is. In New Jersey as it applies to this a generation is three months. ARC is all a once-in-a-generation project.

All I said at the time were things that apparently were confirmed in the main by the press conference today. They’re advocating the Amtrak plan because they say that the feds should take the lead. I said the feds should take the lead if they thought the project was that important.

I said that it was a stupid idea to have a tunnel go to the basement of Macys, and on the whole, the Amtrak tunnel is going to go to an expanded Penn Station under the plan that I saw today.

Today, they touted this plan as ‘having better control over cost overruns.’ But the thing I find interesting about that is that these are the very same people who are saying months ago that I was fabricating the cost overruns. That they didn’t really exist. Someone better get to Chairman Wisniewski quickly so he can amend his talking points. Because now the Democratic United States Senators  are now saying that this project will have better control over cost overruns, that they were claiming months ago didn’t exist.

[...]

I hope all of you are taking note of all the dire predictions that were made and how wrong I was to have cancelled this. And now today the taxpayers of New Jersey are protected and you have real talk about a federal lead on a project that should have been a federal project all along and that if there are going to be contributions from the states, there are going to be contributions from all the states that benefit. Not just the State of New Jersey and its taxpayers which was the ARC plan. Sometimes, to make real change happen, you have to stand up and be counted and make the tough decisions and if I had been intimidated by all the rhetoric from all the folks who were shooting at us at the time, the taxpayers of New Jersey would be on the hook for untold billions of dollars.

I know there are a some on the right who scoff at Christie the You Tube phenom, but I hope the hype doesn’t obscure the substance. Christie keeps making these tough calls and, by my own admittedly biased score keeping, he’s getting nearly all of them right.

In the case of the ARC tunnel he took on three powerful Democratic Senators and most of the MSM over a principle of fiscal responsibility. After months of taking the heat, he has been totally vindicated, to the point where Sen. Schumer and others should be embarrassed for themselves. That’s not hype, that’s victory.

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