Wealth & Money Quote by Corrine Brown

A politician’s “not only...; we should...” is legislative jujitsu: it takes what sounds like a mundane budget ask and reframes it as a national-security imperative. Corrine Brown isn’t just defending Amtrak from the usual accusations of inefficiency; she’s trying to move rail funding into the moral fast lane where lawmakers are likelier to vote yes, fast, and with fewer questions. The key pivot is the word “security,” which smuggles passenger rail out of the culture-war box of “public transit subsidy” and into the post-9/11 vocabulary of protection, resilience, and preparedness.

The intent is plainly transactional: get dollars appropriated. But the subtext is more pointed. Brown is arguing that rail is critical infrastructure, and that starving it is not fiscal prudence but risk-taking. “Upgrade their tracks” sounds like engineering; paired with “safety and security measures,” it becomes a warning about preventable catastrophe - derailments, aging systems, bottlenecks, and vulnerability to attack. She’s also widening the frame from Amtrak as a single company to “the entire rail system,” an attempt to create a coalition: commuter rail, freight interdependencies, urban corridors, rural long-distance lines. If everyone’s implicated, everyone’s district has skin in the game.

Context matters because Amtrak has long been a proxy fight over what government is for. Brown’s wording anticipates skepticism and answers it preemptively: this isn’t charity for trains, it’s baseline upkeep for a network that, if neglected, can fail loudly and publicly. The rhetoric works because it weaponizes the language of security to demand something unglamorous: maintenance.