Small government is when you waste huge amounts of tax dollars supporting and regulating car centric infrastructure instead of just providing affordable, reliable public transit at a fraction of the net cost to both society and the end user. Small government means fighting against providing services to the public so you can take the savings or infrastructure and do massive corporate giveaways. Small government is when you pave over an entire community to build an eight lane interstate. The nominal reason is that everything government does is worse than what the free market can do, and public transit is government (just don’t ask who builds all the 26-lane freeways car centric infrastructure depends on). The real reason is that, gosh, we sure would hate for our investors corporate sponsors donors free market enterprises to struggle, so we’d better lock the public into a system whose gatekeepers are our private enterprises like car makers, insurers, and oil companies.

That said, I agree that Amtrak shouldn’t be holding up freight, but that’s because Amtrak should be on its own alignment far, far more often, pulling 70-110 mph on average instead of underperforming on speed in order to integrate with freight schedules.

The house republicans are also trying to block funding for CAHSR right now.

They know it’s trains not trans correct? Usually the right is after trans folks not trains, but I’m not sure how well they can read.