I-95 And Institutional Failure

When our government fails us, it's time for individual responsibility

Jan 5

Congratulations to all the Mid-Atlantic men of purpose and culture who have been keeping their go-bags and aid kits in the backs of their cars for years on end: I-95 just helped you finally win an argument about preparedness with your wife.

Foster @foster_type

I've got a backpack good for a seven day arctic hike in my trunk at all times and this I95 thing is cancelling out most if not all of the rolled eyes from my wife.

Manu Raju @mkraju

Tim Kaine, who has only eaten an orange since Sunday night, said of his 27-hour travel nightmare on I-95 that he'd sleep with the heater on "full blast" for ten minutes at a time, then turn the engine off so he could sleep for 20-30 minutes. Says the temps were around 12 degrees

I hate I-95 in the area between the Beltway and Fredericksburg just in normal weather — so I can’t begin to imagine the painstaking devotion such an experience would inspire, or the new level of epithets that would be discovered. Words that had been left dormant and long forgotten would be unearthed, like scraping detritus from a dinosaur skull buried since the Cretaceous.

And when Ralph Northam came on TV and radio to say it was my fault as a driver, well, let’s just not think of the urge to kill.

For many, the experience sounds absolutely harrowing — it’s a surprise that no deaths occurred given the freezing temperatures.

Many drivers ran out of gas in freezing temperatures. Some didn't have food or water, and children, pets and people with medical needs are among those stuck in the traffic nightmare. Sen. Tim Kaine, who represents Virginia in the U.S. Senate, was among those trapped on the highway.
Vania Masaya was trapped in the gridlock with her young children and out of gas. Traffic came to a halt for them at about 9 a.m. Monday. Twelve hours later, they had barely moved, and the mother’s fear grew unbearable.
“I just kept thinking, they’re gonna die in this cold,” she said Tuesday, nearly crying. “It was freezing. My daughter's cheeks were so cold.”
Finally, a firefighter came to their window and Masaya shouted for help.
“Can you please just take my kids? You don’t need to take us. Just take my kids, please,” she recalled saying.
The children spent the night inside an ambulance, under blankets on a gurney.

You know a snowed-in I-95’s a real disaster when even our elites, like Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, don’t get to escape it — he apparently spent 27 hours doing his normal two hour commute, with the only sustenance an orange handed out by a generous family returning north from Florida.

Tim Kaine @timkaine

A CT family returning in a packed car from Florida walked by in the middle of the night handing out oranges as we were stopped for hours on I-95. Bless them!

My brother came up from North Carolina after New Year’s to surprise me at my fortieth, and he came without anticipating that his large pickup truck and the family military organizational instinct would be so needed in response to a blizzard that mangled roads in the area.

Emily Domenech @ehdomenech

We just cleared 5 cars and opened a completely blocked off-ramp bc my brother took charge of the effort and people followed. This is how it’s done gentlemen.

Making his way back down to North Carolina during the I-95 shutdown was an experience of itself — he ended up giving a leftover pizza from the night before to a family that had been stuck for 16 hours.

Emily Domenech @ehdomenech

Hey @CMC_MarineCorps, any chance we can get those conveniently located Marines at Quantico to start delivering food to people stranded on 95? My brother just gave his leftover pizza to a family that had been stuck for 16 hours, but he’s just one soldier… https://t.co/UzV7mtqKYt

VDOT @VaDOT

I-95 remains closed in the Fredericksburg area. Snow plows & tow trucks are on the scene. Motorists should plan to avoid travel on I-95 in this area until lanes reopen and significant congestion clears the area. https://t.co/atCkun7zId

Along the way, he worked with groups of men to clear roads and towed people out of bad situations. Of course, this type of thing is frowned upon by the likes of New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait.

New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait, however, used The Reagan Battalion’s neighborly offer to take political shots at the conservative group’s namesake, former President Ronald Reagan.
“The Reaganites used to believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” Chait tweeted.
Chait’s insensitivity to the ongoing crisis was quickly reprimanded by several Twitter users including The Reagan Battalion which encouraged the writer to assist the people in need.
“Now if you can use your account to help people in dire need of assistance and put your politics aside for a few hours that would be great,” the group tweeted.

Of course, while resourcefulness among Americans is a great and good thing, far to lost in this day and age, that does not in any way excuse Northam or the corrupt taxpayer funded folks at VDOT and other agencies from failing to their jobs — pretreating the roads or, once it became clear there was an emergency, calling up the National Guard. But they claim they couldn’t really have done much anyway:

Matt Gregory @MattGregoryNews

After the #i95virginia traffic debacle, people have asked: Should the @GovernorVA have called in the National Guard? We verified what-if anything- the Guard could do to help: @wusa9

Dominic Pino writes:

In a blog post from 2018, Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute noted that “corruption is alleged to be ‘rampant’ and ‘endemic,'” and “the corruption has been apparently going on for years.” He links to a Washington Post story describing hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes among snowplow contractors, and some drug deals as well. A prosecutor quoted in the story said, “This is a more pervasive problem in the Virginia Department of Transportation than is known.”
The official named in that report, Anthony Willie, was sentenced to seven years in prison for an $11 million bribery scheme that lasted over five years. According to the DOJ’s statement on the sentencing, Willie and another official “secretly used their official positions to enrich themselves by soliciting and accepting cash bribes in exchange for various favorable official acts, such as awarding lucrative snow removal work to local trucking companies during winter snow storms in the northern Virginia area.” Actually removing snow has not always been the top priority in awarding VDOT snow-removal contracts in recent years.

Whatever the after-action investigation reveals, it seems likely that VDOT reform will now become a priority for the incoming Glenn Youngkin administration — a good test of his Mitt Romney-esque technocratic capabilities. Conservatives just shouldn’t let any distraction be an excuse to squish out on CRT.

Pelosi’s J6 Commission Failure:

Mollie Hemingway. “Still, the plan might have worked had Pelosi put together a decent committee. Yet she made several critical errors if she hoped it would be taken seriously.

“Consider, first, how Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy managed a similarly important committee with a confidence that Pelosi has lacked.

“Democrats threw together their first impeachment of President Trump in 2019 after their long-promised Russia collusion impeachment fell apart due to lack of evidence. Democrats and their media enablers had been claiming for years that Trump was an illegitimate president, and some Republicans had helped them in their general efforts to oust him. McCarthy had a difficult task, knowing that Republican voters weren’t nearly so weak as some of their leaders and would desert the party if it helped Democrats impeach President Trump.

“McCarthy was constrained by Democrats’ avoidance of the Judiciary Committee as the venue for the impeachment investigation. Pelosi was concerned that Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, didn’t have what it would take to run impeachment. Impeachment was instead run through the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, then led by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

“That committee included a few Republican members known for opposing Trump, such as Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas. He and Mike Conaway, also of Texas, had already announced they weren’t running again. Some were urging McCarthy to remove Hurd and replace him with someone else. But McCarthy let everyone who wanted stay, while also encouraging any members who enjoyed performing oversight of the intelligence community but didn’t want to take part in an impeachment circus to step away temporarily. When Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Arizona, graciously agreed to such a move, McCarthy replaced him with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

“Even that choice showed McCarthy’s confidence, since both McCarthy and Jordan had run for the top leadership spot not long prior. Jordan had also successfully helped block McCarthy from becoming speaker a few years prior. But once McCarthy was made Republican leader, he made Jordan the top Republican on the House’s Oversight and Reform Committee, even over the objections of his supporters on the Steering Committee.

“The diverse Republican group on the Intelligence Committee ran an effective opposition, even with Schiff and Pelosi manipulating the proceedings for maximum gain. In the end, Republicans held together, with not a single member of the conference voting to impeach Trump over his phone call with the Ukraine president. It was significant that conservatives and moderates all agreed the charges didn’t pass muster. In the Senate, only Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah fell for the impeachment trial as led by Schiff, leading to Trump’s first acquittal.

“By contrast, Pelosi’s roster management has been something of a disaster. Chairman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi is not even pretending to aim for impartiality and is not well versed in due process. He filed a lawsuit against Trump months before Pelosi chose him as her chairman. And he recently told rabid MSNBC conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow that if you invoke your constitutional rights against being forced to testify, you are “part and parcel guilty” of crimes.

“Pelosi picked Schiff for the committee despite — or perhaps because of — his years of fabulism and lies concerning the Russia collusion hoax. Schiff falsely claimed for years that he had secret evidence that Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, leaked fake Donald Trump, Jr. emails, fabricated the transcript of a 2019 phone call between former President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president, and lied about his interactions with the so-called whistleblower behind House Democrats’ first impeachment of Trump.

“Far from protecting members from the politicized committee, Pelosi also harmed a few vulnerable members by putting them on it. Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Florida, was viewed as a “rising star” in the party, even being floated in May as a tough potential opponent for Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. But a few weeks ago, she announced she would not even try to win re-election for her House seat.

“Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia is also facing a tough re-election race, in a district the Republican governor-elect just won. Her seat is being targeted by Republicans. Being part of a uniparty probe with ethical problems can not be helping.

“Pelosi’s fatal error, however, was blowing up her own committee by taking what she herself admitted was the “unprecedented” step of removing the Republican ranking member and another top member from it. Pelosi said that she would not allow Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, a distinguished Afghanistan veteran and leader of the Republican Study Committee, from serving. She also banned Jordan, now ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.

“Pelosi later claimed the members’ concerns with the integrity of the 2020 election were the reason. But that made no sense, since she appointed Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, and he objected to Trump’s election in 2017. Pelosi herself objected to President George W. Bush’s election in 2004 and said there was “no question” that the 2016 election was “hijacked.”

“The resolution establishing the committee requires the committee to follow House rules on the ranking member and minority party representation. But since Pelosi removed the ranking member, its subpoena and deposition activities are at best questionable, and at worst illicit.”