Christie’s Chance

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

If there is a silver lining to the scandal engulfing Governor Christie it is going to be the way it illuminates the bigger problem of the Port Authority of New York. This is the subject of the column this morning by Ira Stoll, editor of the Future of Capitalism. He thinks the way for Mr. Christie to beat back those who have been criticizing him for closing lanes to the George Washington Bridge is to sell the sagging span to private owners and let their enterprise start to work between New York and New Jersey.

This stroke of genius on Mr. Stoll’s part will not surprise his regular readers. He stunned Mayor Bloomberg, when interviewing His Honor for the first issue of the revived New York Sun, by trans-supposing a question in respect of whether the mayor might sell the subways. This is what prompted the mayor to demand to know whether the New York Sun was on hallucigens. We answered it in the first editorial we ever published, “What We’re Smoking.”

In that editorial we questioned the notion that “the structures that have dominated New York” need remain “ossified and unchangeable, whether they be the subways, say, or the stadium setup or the welfare laws or the public school system or the marginal tax rates. . . .” These columns have stood for nothing if not taking a look at these most basic structures. And the Port Authority, of which the benighted bridge is a part, is right there at the top of the list. We can’t think of a better man for the job than a cantankerous critter like Mr. Christie.

Unless it’s the United States Congress. The thing to keep in mind about the Port Authority is that it is an interstate compact. These are agreements between two or more states and are forbidden in Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution, unless they are approved by Congress. Not just the Senate. The whole Congress. The Port Authority represents that it is the first interstate agency ever created under the compact clause; it was duly approved by Congress and is therefore under its suzerainty. It strikes us that what we need is a leader like Mr. Christie to take on the Port Authority from the local end and a reform Congress to take it from the national end.

Just last month, the Web site NJ.com reported, Democratic state lawmakers going after Mr. Chrisie in Trenton called on Congress to do a top-to-bottom review of the Port Authority. It quoted Senator Loretta Weinberg and Assemblyman John Wisniewski as saying they wanted federal lawmakers “to act on a report issued four months ago by the Government Accountability Office, which criticized the authority for not being transparent or accountable with regard to a recent toll hike.” That was a report about toll hikes.

The problems we want to open up involve more than just tolls, and we have our doubts about whether they are going to be opened up by the Democrats. What entices us is the prospect of far more radical reforms, designed to reduce the encumbrance of government on the progress of our city so as let the market start to work. Children born in the smoking metropolis that woke to a new age on September 12, 2001, are going to come to adulthood before the Port Authority gets Ground Zero rebuilt.

Rockefeller Center, which may have been the largest private building project in modern history, was completed in nine years. So the way for Mr. Christie to get the critics off his back is to go on the offensive. He’s not going to be able to do so by carrying on about what a good job President Obama has been doing doling out Sandy Aid or using public money to run ads featuring his family. He is only going to be able to do so by focusing on clear principles of political economy and evoking a vision not for closing lanes but for opening them. Is he up to it?


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