Watch: Chris Cuomo Calls Out Republican Rep. For Cutting AMTRAK Funding After Tragic Crash
In this clip, Chris Cuomo from CNN’s New Day grills Bill Shuster (R-PA) about the Republican Congress’s decision to cut funding from the AMTRAK program, even as the ashes still smolder from a tragic train derailment in northern Philadelphia earlier this week. Cuomo, an aggressive and very intelligent interviewer, gets right to it: “I don’t know how its helpful for your speaker to stand up and say that it’s stupid to ask whether or not this situation that we’re dealing with down here had anything to do with infrastructure. I think you know the answer to that has to be yes.”
Shuster buries his head in the sand and passes the buck: “No, what I believe is that this failure had nothing to do with money, a failure on either the operator’s part or the equipment’s part, it doesn’t have anything to do with money.” Shuster fails to realize that this is not a question of what he might “believe”. It is an empirical fact that lack of funding leads to failed infrastructure, which then leads to accidents. The Koch-inspired Republican effort to starve the beast, privatize AMTRAK and the rest of America’s public institutions is well under way, and American lives are being lost in the process.
Watch it here:
