"How dumb can they be?"

That's what Minnesota's Republican governor said to anti-tax activists at the 2005 ceremony in which he scuttled the 2005 transportation bill. The "they" he referred to was conscientious lawmakers who tried to pass an increase in the gas tax to be devoted to things like fixing highways and, not incidentally, bridges. The ceremony even featured one of those giant prop "VETO" stamps.

This excellent diary on Daily Kos [1] lays out the story. The summary:

1. In May 2005, bipartisan transportation bill which would have added an extra $300 million a year to MnDoT was shot down by Pawlenty to avoid raising taxes.

2. This move effectively bankrupted MnDoT until early this year (and this year, of course, there have still been snags in getting the funding).

3. Minnesotans approved the spending by ballot in November 2006...

4. ...but even that spending was insufficient to cover the expected problems.

But nobody could have predicted the levees would... oh, wait, wrong infrastructure disaster.

By the way, this May another transportation bill went through the legislature... with a vetoproof majority. Pawlenty proceeded to veto it anyway. Congress failed to override the veto. So, in addition to there being no money to watch out for problems, there's still no money to fix the problems. Comforting, isn't it?

Don't politicize this tragedy? This is as deeply political as an isue can be—was so ever since an E. coli conservative governor starting tramping around whoring himself to anti-tax activists and dancing around with giant prop veto stamps.