Where have you gone, Louie Gohmert? Way back, you said that “Washington, D.C. is also the only city in the entire country that every senator and every member of Congress has a vested interest in seeing that it works properly, that water works, sewer works, and no other city in America has that.”

The only reason we ask is to see if you could kinda tap on Sen. Tom Coburn’s office door and sorta ask him to see it the way you do – that’d be great. Because without Metro funding, this city certainly isn’t going to “work properly.”

Sen. Coburn (R-Okla.), whose most recent notable contribution to the Senate floor was attempting to take a bill allocating federal lands to many states and amend a rider that would allow people to bring loaded firearms into any National Park, this week accused Metro of trying to steal money from American children. WTOP quoted the senator as saying he’d be “happy to roadblock” a bill which would provide $1.5 billion in federal funding for Metro over the next 10 years.

Luckily, it seems like his fellow members of Congress see Coburn as that guy who you have to avoid in order to invite everyone else to the party, but ends up showing anyway and drinking all your good booze. And breaking your furniture. Sometimes, the best way to deal with those people is in numbers. Both Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) lay the verbal smackdown, Cardin stating that “to have one senator say that we won’t be able to vote on it, is an abuse of that senator’s prerogative.” Davis was a little bit more firm: “One senator can get rolled, but we prefer to do this amicably.”

Of course, it’s plenty ironic that Cardin feels as though he can criticize a fellow senator for holding up the District’s business, but we’ll take his support on this issue nonetheless. Nearly half of Metro’s rush-hour passengers are federal workers, so it only makes sense that lawmakers on Capitol Hill ought to be fighting to help make the Washington transit system work properly.

Photo by Samer Farha.