In this clip, Rachel Maddow, with an quiet severity and disappointment, berates our do-nothing Republican Congress for allowing our transportation infrastructure to decay to the point where our railroads are so poorly maintained that people have died. “There’s no mystery about this disaster in Philadelphia, and what cost all those lives in all of those places, and there will be no mystery the next time it happens. We know what we need to do! Our government just won’t make it happen!”
She then discusses the fact the train was going “too quickly”- 100 miles per hour, and debunks the idea that this contributed to the crash. She remarks that between the cities of Barcelona and Madrid, the average train speed is 175 miles per hour, whereas in the United States, on the Northeast Corridor, the landmark American railroad, the average speed is 68 miles an hour.
She concludes with a moving and brutal condemnation of Congress and the willingness of Republicans to sacrifice American lives and limbs in the name of fiscal conservatism: “We are a great nation that has allowed the world class national infrastructure that our grandparents built and our parents handed down to us to erode and suffer and starve to the point that it is decrepit and deadly. And this is a failure of governance. This is on Congress’s head.”
Watch it here: