Thom's way or no highway
by Tom Sullivan
Besides his woman problem, North Carolina GOP Senate nominee Thom Tillis has a toll problem. And a base problem.
Interstate 77 in Tillis' district badly needs widening. But Thom and his ALEC buddies insist on installing High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes over objections from his party, local Republican lawmakers, and a conservative think tank in Raleigh. His local tea party calls the I-77 project Thom's Tholl Road.
The GOP is expert at exploiting wedge issues to divide and conquer opponents. But here the wedge is intraparty. There is a split among the GOP's right-wing populists, its libertarian ideologues, and it's ALEC-friendly, crony corporatists. It seems HOT lanes have become a flash point. Free-marketeer libertarians consider that when government (We the People) provides any product or service on a not-for-profit basis, it's another big-government crime against capitalism; they favor anything that gets government out of the way of private profit. Grassroots fiscal conservatives see schemes such as HOT lanes -- contracted to foreign conglomerates, funded with federal loans, and with private profit margins backstopped with state tax dollars -- as yet another example of crony capitalism screwing taxpayers. It is. And it's just what the Koch brothers' privateers want more of.
So how big a wedge is this? Behold the Weekly Standard from April, critiquing at length a 75-year, single-bidder HOT lanes concession in Virginia:
The arrangement is every capitalist’s dream: free land, developed with taxpayer money, for privatized profits and socialized losses.
Of course, in the Weekly Standard's fever dream it's not rent-seeking corporatists ramrodding privatization of America's highways, but progressive ideologues (and libertarians) bent on discouraging a middle-class lifestyle they find "distasteful."
Thom Tillis himself did not address the HOT lane issue at an appearance before a group of business leaders in Asheville Friday morning (timestamp 1:00:00). But as party activists and business-minded constituents have before, several times on Friday questioners asked state candidates about highway funding and the possibility of seeing of "dynamic tolling" on I-77 and I-26. These aren't progressives and libertarians. They are Thom Tillis' base voters. And they are uneasy.
Hard to tell, but when even conservative are worried about the impact ALEC's designs might have for their small businesses, tolls just might be a sleeper issue for Republicans that so far the press has missed.
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