J.D. Vance: Train Robber

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

The better part of a trillion dollars seems like a lot of money to help J.D. Vance build his union-goon-trad-Catholic-tech-bro 2028 primary coalition.

 

Wait—you didn’t think the Railway Safety Act of 2026 was about railway safety, did you? Oh, you sweet summer child!

 

The Railway Safety Act—now folded into $580 billion (and counting!) BUILD America 250 Act—had its genesis in the 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. At the time of the derailment, Vance was a senator from Ohio. You may be forgiven if you have forgotten Washington’s most shameless ideological cross-dresser had been Ohio’s junior senator, a job he held on paper for 738 days but actually did for about four and a half minutes; rather than doing senator stuff–whatever that is these days–Sen. Vance spent much of his time explaining away everything he ever pretended to believe while finagling for a spot on Donald Trump’s 2024 ticket.

 

Vance leapt on the East Palestine accident, which was politically attractive to him in many ways: It provided a useful victimization narrative for a group of overwhelmingly white and relatively low-income people residing in a declining corner of Appalachian Ohio, i.e., people straight out of Hillbilly Elegy. It also provided an opportunity to write a bill that would enable Vance to hand out some choice political favors to a group of powerful labor groups (there are a dozen different unions claiming a piece of the railroad business), which Vance and others of his ilk see as being both practically and symbolically important to building the kind of corporatist-nationalist political organization he wants the Republican Party to be. It also provided Vance, a golem molded from Peter Thiel’s pocket lint, to present himself as a champion of the working class against the corporations and their ruling oligarchs. Not since Ted Cruz was forced to publicly litigate the complicated ménage à trois he maintains with his wife and Goldman Sachs has a more ridiculous tribune of the plebs been created.

 

It is not as though there is no room for improvement when it comes to rail safety—though there is some very important context to take into account. In a typical year, there are around 1,000 railway deaths (pedestrian and vehicular), the overwhelming majority of which are “trespassing” cases, meaning people illegally present on the tracks for one reason or another, with somewhere between one-third and one-half (possibly more) of those cases being suicides. And while neither of these provides a perfect point of comparison, consider that the United States typically sees more than 40,000 highway deaths a year, with about 5,400 of those involving commercial trucks and buses. (These are dwarfed as a statistical matter by the 75,000-100,000 deaths from accidental poisonings that the United States sees annually.) Trains are responsible for about 40 percent of total U.S. long-distance freight shipping (as measured in ton-miles). The thing is, the bill does little or nothing in the way of advancing any practical railway safety interest. But it does establish roadblocks to developments that could improve safety, such as greater automation—everybody likes protecting jobs, but there are more railroad accidents resulting from human error than from equipment failures.

 

As Veronique de Rugy observes over at Reason:

 

Labor organizations pushed provisions that would narrow who counts as qualified to inspect freight cars, thereby reserving those jobs for organized carmen. They opposed railroads’ de facto practice of routing inspection volume to non-carmen staff (conductors) as a cost saver that didn’t affect safety. Legislators ultimately crafted a compromise that reflects the competing interests of these two powerful stakeholders more than measurable safety outcomes. This is regulatory capture in action.

 

The role of organized labor is especially revealing. At a recent Senate hearing, Teamsters union officials openly acknowledged that autonomous trucking is going to happen and that workers have historically adapted to technological changes. Rather than trying to prevent deployment of the technology altogether, they argued that policymakers should proactively focus on worker transition issues. This is sensible enough. Yet many of the same labor groups strongly oppose automation and technology deployment in freight rail, including with systems believed to improve safety and detect defects far earlier than traditional inspection methods.

 

Why is automation acceptable in trucking but unacceptable in rail? The distinction, once again, is less about safety than politics.

 

While the unions and their allies have been focused on increasing (and mandating) the use of “wayside” sensors—which sit by the tracks and monitor things like whether a wheel is getting too hot—where the technology is actually moving is toward on-board sensing technology (like what you have in your car that tells you when a tire is low), which monitor conditions constantly rather than at intervals. But the unions want to keep those jobs manning the sensor stations, and even more so, they want to protect jobs related to in-person inspections. As de Rugy argues, these are only loosely connected, at best, to any measurable safety outcome. As for automation, trains already are largely automated—the typical freight train today operates with no more than a two-man crew, and the current debate is about whether the two-man minimum will be legislated as an ongoing requirement. This is, as de Rugy correctly observes, very little more than clientelism.

 

Many House Republicans had been opposed to what is in this bill, but, then, Republicans used to pretend to be opposed to $580 billion legislative jackpots in general. But Vance wants this and apparently has managed to persuade Trump to push for it, too, and it would be foolish to bet on Senate Republicans to show any spine in the face of pressure from the White House and the wheel-greasing that comes along with throwing so many literal (if you weighed it out in $100 bills) tons of money at voters. It would be useful for the United States to have at least one fiscally conservative political party, and one party that did not believe in trying to put its big stupid snout into a reasonably well-functioning private-sector enterprise and try to operate it by remote control from Washington. Ah, but those are old ideas! Zombie Reaganism, if you like, or zombie libertarianism.

 

Old principles, yes. But good principles.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

Our friends over at We Pay the Tariffs—an advocacy group with a wonderfully self-explanatory name and purpose—have been running some numbers for those of you who might have found your Independence Day celebrations more expensive than you’d been expecting. They report:

 

Fireworks: $100 million in added tariffs prior to May 2026 when imports are likely to surge for the 250th celebrations. Nearly all consumer fireworks are imported, the overwhelming majority from China.

 

Party and picnic supplies: nearly $1 billion in added tariffs. Paper and plastic plates and cups, utensils, tablecloths, napkins are largely imported and hit by past IEEPA, current Section 122, and potentially future Section 301 tariffs.

 

Grills and grill tools: over $700 million in added tariffs. Steel and aluminum grills, their components, and the tools used to cook on them typically face Section 232 “national security” tariffs.

 

Beach and pool wear: over $650 million in added tariffs on swimsuits, sunglasses, and goggles. These costs stem largely from past IEEPA, current Section 122, and potentially future Section 301 tariffs.

 

There is more. Much more.

 

Forgive my repetition here, but I’ll keep repeating it until the powers that be quit being stupid and dishonest about it: A tariff is simply a sales tax on consumers of imported goods, paid by the importer. The Trump administration knows this, which is why it has exempted oil and other imported petroleum products from the tax. The tariffs are a worst-of-both-worlds proposition: They do not generate enough revenue to make a huge difference in our fiscal situation or impose enough pain to change those trade behaviors that should be changed (e.g., the Chinese theft of intellectual property), but they do raise prices, disrupt supply chains, and inject unwelcome uncertainty into the planning of U.S. consumers and firms. The tariffs are Trump’s dumbest idea—and we’re talking here about a guy who thought that maybe we could use bleach or UV light to treat COVID infections inside the human body and makes Marco Rubio wear Florsheim shoes that are two-and-a-half sizes too big for him. The bar for dumbest is pretty high for these clowns. But, until they propose nuking the moon …

 

And Furthermore

 

As some of you will know, on Tuesday NPR legal reporter Nina Totenberg wrongly reported that Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito had announced his retirement. It was an epic blunder. And, bearing in mind that Steve Hayes has asked me to stop using so much profanity, take a gander at the [impeccably punctuated and baroquely complex chain of expletives deleted] that Slate published in response:

 

[W]as it an egregious, personal error, akin to Totenberg stealing into Alito’s hotel room and absconding with an internal organ, as it has been widely treated? We don’t think so. Indeed, what has been grievously missed in the melee is that this is not really a press story at all—it is a story about court transparency and hubris. This mistake reveals an institution that has repeatedly and systemically sidestepped public accountability by making itself impossible to cover by human reporters and, in so doing, has made itself vastly harder to understand by the very public it is meant to serve.

 

That is baloney. There are lots of human reporters who cover the Supreme Court without making up stories about things that did not happen. We employ a few here! But if you have ever read Slate’s Supreme Court coverage, then you will understand why Slate’s writers and editors do not believe that the Supreme Court can be competently covered—they have never seen it done.

 

But maybe even that is too generous: I believe that somebody can do 20 pull-ups.

 

Words About Words

 

Last week, I wrote about Boko Haram, the jihadist group, and passed along the fact—which may not be a fact!—about the group’s name, that it combines the Hausa word boko, borrowed from the English books, with the Arabic religious term haram, meaning forbidden: Figuratively “Western education is forbidden” but literally “books are forbidden.” Little did I know I was stepping into a linguistic minefield of Hausa etymology!

 

Sources that say that the etymology I passed along is bogus say that boko is an indigenous Hausa word meaning “sham” or “bogus,” and they point to Hausa phrases meaning “sham education” and the like using boko. Other sources insist that this Hausa word is itself based on the borrowed English books, that it was used to describe the Roman alphabet used to write Hausa by critics who preferred Arabic script. I do not know which is correct. But I will point you to a very interesting discussion titled: “The phrase Boko Haram contains no etymologically Hausa word.” It is an interesting read.