Rep. Rod Blum is a freshman Republican congressman from Iowa. What a life he leads! He flies into Washington, D.C., to begin his arduous three-day workweek, gets in a cab, hops on 395 toward downtown, and what does he see? Construction. Cranes along the Potomac waterfront, a whole host of them. Rod Blum simply does not care for this.
And so he calls for a recession in a major American city.
This comes from a personal account of Blum’s, though Blum’s official congressional account retweeted it. Last October, Blum also tweeted, and retweeted, a photo of what appear to be the same construction cranes from a different vantage point further down the highway.
It is interesting to see a congressman call for a decline in the economy of a major American city that’s home to more than 650,000 residents, not all of them evil lobbyists, and whose economy is the source of income for many more in the metropolitan region. The development that so grinds his gears is a massive waterfront project that’s been in the works for years and has a long way to go before completion, providing ample work for construction workers and contractors and engineers and you name it. Also, perhaps, companies that offer software for construction projects—much like Digital Canal, the Iowa-based company that businessman Rod Blum made a fortune running.
If he wants to vaguely tether D.C.’s construction boom to the heedless largesse of the federal government, he can go ahead and do so. We’d like to point out, though, that as a member of Iowa’s congressional delegation, Blum’s foundational purpose in Washington is to stuff his district’s pockets with agricultural subsidies. Iowa’s first congressional district has received billions over the years. If he wants to shrink the special interests’ power in D.C. to necessitate the city’s economic collapse—as per his theory—that’s fine, but his district’s economy would go down with the ship.
Blum—whose office did not respond to a request for comment about why he hopes for a recession in the nation’s capital—barely won his seat in 2014 in a district that tilts Democratic. He’s among the most endangered incumbents in Congress this cycle, so airheaded demagoguery in all its forms is to be expected. Will this sort of cant work for him? Maybe. People do hate the District of Columbia. But it didn’t work for Jeb Bush.
