Once again, Southerners in Congress are ready to damage the U.S. auto industry, essentially for their own region’s gain, while blindly adhering to their conservative ideology.
In order to fund emergency relief efforts in the tornado-ravaged South, the House Appropriations Committee, which is dominated by Southerners, chopped $1.5 billion from a program created in 2007 to encourage the manufacture of fuel-efficient cars, engines and auto batteries. On Thursday, the full House followed suit.
The idea of requiring a budget “offset” to pay for storm-related relief and reconstruction is appalling to some Democrats on Capitol Hill, who are accustomed to approving emergency spending when responding to a natural disaster. Republicans say this is an example of fiscal discipline.
The choice of the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing loan initiative as a program to tap for funds has further infuriated many Michigan lawmakers.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who played a leading role in establishing the program, pointed out that the loans have created or saved tens of thousands of U.S. jobs by helping automakers and suppliers to transform old manufacturing facilities to build high-tech energy-efficient products.
Stabenow also noted that one of the winners in the competition for these loans was Ford Motor Co., which used the borrowed capital to retool their Michigan Assembly plant in Wayne. In turn, those loans helped build the new Ford Focus and battery-electric Ford Focus, employ thousands of workers, and bring jobs back from Mexico to fully staff the new production lines.
Instead of slashing the advanced vehicle program, Stabenow suggested eliminating the federal subsidies for oil companies.
While this story has gained little attention across Michigan, it has obvious parallels to 2008 when Southern senators led the way in blocking federal loans to General Motors and Chrysler. At the time, they never mentioned all the federal aid businesses in the South receive after major storms. And they brushed aside references to the foreign automakers in their home states that would clearly have benefited from the domestic industry taking a huge hit.
This time, it’s the Appropriations Committee in the GOP-led House that called the shots. A majority of the Republicans on the panel — 15 — are from the South and the chairman of this powerful committee is Rep. Harold Rogers of Kentucky.
In a letter to Rogers earlier this week, Rep. Sander Levin and 16 other Democratic representatives urged the Appropriations Committee not to disrupt the development of a new generation of clean energy vehicles at this “critical juncture.” Rep. John Dingell also signed the correspondence.
The letter said, in part:
“While we must deal with the unsustainable deficit, we also must take care of the American people whose lives have been nearly destroyed through no fault of their own. American people whose lives have been nearly destroyed through no fault of their own. As such, we urge you to move forward with an emergency spending bill that takes care of the unforeseeable emergencies, keeps us on solid fiscal footing and does not harm future American competitiveness.”
