JD Vance: Railroads ‘got into bed with big government’ as Biden administration makes it harder to clean up Eastern Palestine mess
Senator JD Vance (R-OH) told host Matthew Boyle in an exclusive interview on SiriusXM Breitbart News Saturday that the Eastern Palestine rail disaster is not evidence of a problem with the free market, given that “these railroad companies got into bed with big government”. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is currently making it harder to clean up the small-town Ohio area.
“These railroad companies have totally gotten into bed with big government,” Vance said. “Most recently, three months ago, they were bailed out by the government in the form of the feds coming in, Joe Biden and others coming in to fix the railroad union problem.”
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“So you can’t tell me it’s the free market when you’ve been sleeping with big government and begging for big government privileges,” the senator continued.
Vance added that the Republican Party is “on the side of the firefighters and police who respond to these disasters, not the big railroad companies.”
“In eastern Palestine right now there are thousands of tons of toxic dirt,” the senator added. “Since that train derailment, the chemicals have seeped into the ground, so we have to dig up that material, that contaminated soil, and transport it to appropriate facilities for disposal.”
“There are mounds of toxic earth literally sitting on the ground in eastern Palestine. You know why? Because the Joe Biden administration is making it harder to get these things to the proper disposal sites,” Vance revealed.
“We just can’t forget these people,” the senator added. “If this town is not cleared in time, it is a disastrous failure of the government; a disastrous failure of every institution in our country that should care for the vulnerable.
Vance also noted that “there are all these ripple effects” of the Ohio railroad disaster, such as “farmers who can’t sell their hay, can’t sell their chicken eggs, because people are terrified that eastern Palestine is too contaminated.” .”
“There are small businesses that are completely hemorrhaging,” he added. “Think about what happened during COVID, but what is happening in a small town where just about everything has been shut down.”
As for what to do to prevent these types of disasters, Vance noted that he introduced a bipartisan bill.
“We’re not trying to create a new regulatory regime here, but we want trains to pay when they cause this problem. I think that’s completely fair and appropriate,” the senator said.
In addition to making the railroads pay, the bill also “provides proper notice to first responders when entering to fight fires in these environments” so that “they actually know what they’re dealing with.”
“It’s a big problem in eastern Palestine,” Vance said. “These guys – we’re talking about an almost all-volunteer fire department – they went to fight the fire in eastern Palestine and they had no idea they were dealing with toxic chemicals. We need to change that.
The bill also creates an incentive for “those rails to install security detectors along the track,” the senator said.
“The train was starting to disintegrate,” Vance said of the Norfolk Southern-operated train that derailed in eastern Palestine last month. “The seal bearings were starting to disintegrate even before it crashed.”
“Someone should have realized this and recognized the problem before it led to this catastrophic derailment,” he said.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangeloand on Instagram.
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