On Tuesday, Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s office confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that the Nevada senator no longer favors publicly funding a high-speed magnetic-levitation (“maglev”) train between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a project he enthusiastically supported for years. Instead, Reid is suddenly throwing his support behind the DesertXpress, a privately funded rail venture between the two cities. Reid is claiming that his change of heart is merely pragmatic — but the underlying circumstances of the move may raise some pertinent questions about his political integrity.
The construction of a 300-mph maglev train between the two cities was a project that Reid had long championed. In June 2008, he secured a $45 million earmark to help push the project forward. More recently, during February’s secretive last-minute negotiations over what would be included in the $787 billion stimulus bill, Reid succeeded in quadrupling the money the bill allocated for high-speed rail to a total of $8 billion. Immediately afterward, Reid’s office issued a press release observing that Reid’s “proposed Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas rail might get a big chunk of the money,” according to the Associated Press. Reid quickly came under fire from Republican leaders for securing additional funding for a project to benefit his constituents, because the president and Democratic leaders had repeatedly claimed the stimulus would be earmark-free.
Further, Reid had long been on record as supporting a maglev train over the DesertXpress, which is also a high-speed — but not a maglev — train. When Reid obtained the $45 million earmark for the maglev project, the Hill newspaper reported that the funding “would give new life to the maglev project and accelerate a battle with DesertXpress.” Further, Tom Stone, president of DesertXpress, said, “Our view is we don’t need [federal funding], and we don’t want it.”
So why is Reid suddenly abandoning the maglev project in favor of DesertXpress? Officially, the Senate majority leader is acknowledging that maglev technology is unreliable and expensive. “I’ve been working on this for 30 years,” Reid told the Los Angeles Times. “We’ve gotten nowhere. Maglev projects have been abandoned around the world. It’s time to stop talking and start doing something.” But this is hardly a new criticism: Maglev skeptics — including Nevada’s other senator, Republican John Ensign — have always raised the issue of the trains’ cost and unreliability.
However, in a move almost as surprising as Reid’s decision to support DesertXpress, Reid’s current reelection bid has been prominently endorsed by Sig Rogich, a prominent Nevada Republican and major fundraiser for the Bush and McCain presidential campaigns. Rogich is also one of the major backers of DesertXpress.
“[Rogich] just endorsed him and put a whole list of Republicans together [endorsing Reid]. He’s working on Reid’s campaign now,” Chuck Muth, a Nevada political consultant and the former executive director of the American Conservative Union, told National Review Online. Rogich didn’t publicly endorse Reid until late February — after the passage of the stimulus bill. But, according to Muth, Rogich was preparing to support Reid much earlier. “I know Sig, and I knew that he was backing Reid a long time ago. I’m sure we talked about it right after the election last year,” Muth said. “The way he explained it to me, Nevada is a small state, and we have very little clout in Congress based on population, and it would be foolish to give up the clout the Senate majority leader has.”
Might this arrangement be a quid pro quo? “That [suggestion] is all I’ve been hearing about for the last two days,” Muth says. “I have no first-person knowledge, but it would not surprise me at all if Sig Rogich and Harry Reid had talked about this project a long time ago, long before the stimulus funding came out.”
Of course, says Muth, it’s also true that Reid may have simply worn out his constituents’ patience with the maglev train: “The explanation in the paper today is that Reid is tired of waiting. He wants something done before his reelection. This maglev-train idea has been around — I moved here [to Nevada] in 1988 and we’ve been talking about that ever since then, at least. He wants to be able to show some progress on this, and that DesertXpress train of Sig Rogich’s promises to have something going by 2010, when he’s up for reelection.” Again, though, the difficulties – including the lengthy time line – involved in constructing a maglev-train route are hardly new concerns.
In the meantime, Reid’s reelection prospects, which started out chancy, have actually been worsening. A Las Vegas Review-Journal/Mason-Dixon poll in late May found that 45 percent of Nevada voters said they will “definitely” vote against Reid next year. Only 30 percent said they would reelect him. Reid’s position may have suddenly become precarious enough that he needs Rogich’s support. The same poll also found that only 30 percent of independents supported Reid — numbers that could perhaps be swayed by the vocal support of Republicans such as Rogich.
Reid’s office, meanwhile, is downplaying the relationship between the senator and Rogich, telling the Review-Journal that the senator is “connected to people on just about every side of every issue.”