Last week, the Washington Post confirmed the obvious . . . . that drivers in Northern Virginia and the D.C. Metro area generally, have one of the worst commutes in the nation.

Washington area workers are more likely to travel to jobs outside their home counties than commuters in any other region in the nation, according to a new study.

A higher percentage of Virginia residents live and work in different counties than commuters in any other state; Marylanders ranked second, according to “Commuting in America III,” a national report on commuting patterns and trends published yesterday by the Transportation Research Board.

The Washington region is second only to New York for the percentage of workers with “extreme commutes,” which the study defined as 90 minutes or more each way. Of the 12 counties with the highest percentage of long commutes, the region had three: Prince William, Prince George’s and Montgomery.

While traffic hasn’t really emerged as a major issue in the high profile Allen Webb campaign (they’ve decided to take the low road and focus on Senator Allen’s apparent penchant for racial slurs and Jim Webb’s fondness for pedophilia) it has emerged as an issue in our local congressional campaigns and will almost certainly be the leading issue in next years state elections.

As a resident and commuter in this area for almost 10 years, I have very definite opinions on the subject, having made the commute into D.C. from the McLean/Tyson’s Corner area in nearly every way possible.

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Conservative Virginia readers will want to pay close attention to the Washington Post’s endorsement of Representative Frank Wolf, the long-serving Tenth District Republican.

Here is one of the highlights of the Post’s October 14, 2006 paean to the senior member of the House appropriations panel:

“It was chiefly at his prodding that Congress established a bipartisan commission on Iraq, led by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former representative Lee H. Hamilton, that represents the best hope at this point of forging a national consensus on how to proceed in the war.”

Last month, Insight Magazine quoted the congressman as saying:

“‘What the United States needs on Iraq is some fresh ideas from people able to speak out, and no one is more qualified to do that than Jim Baker,’ Mr. Wolf said.”

But national-security expert Michael Rubin has a different take on what he calls “The stacked Baker-Hamilton Commission.” In his Weekly Standard article Conclusion First, Debate Afterwards . . . Rubin writes - - -

“POLICYMAKERS ARE ABUZZ with the explosive recommendations for U.S. policy toward Iraq soon to be released by the Baker-Hamilton Commission: Abandon democracy, seek political compromise with the Sunni insurgents, and engage Tehran and Damascus as partners to secure stability in their neighbor.While former secretary of state James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton said they would withhold their report until after the elections on November 7 to avoid its politicization, they have discussed their findings with the press. On October 8, for example, Baker appeared on ABC’s This Week, and the next day he discussed the group’s findings with Charlie Rose. On October 12, both Baker and Hamilton appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”

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On Friday, I argued that the “U.S. House of Representatives has, on most survival issues, been the unrecognized strongpoint for conservatives.”

Yesterday National Review on Line commentator Mark Levin struck and amplified the same chord. Levin writes:

“The fact is that the House is more conservative than either the Senate or, in many cases, the executive branch. The House pushed for energy exploration in places like ANWR, only to be thwarted in the Senate. The House pushed for a border-security- first agenda, against the “comprehensive” amnesty bill first demanded by the Senate and the president. And while the House can be blamed legitimately for spending too much, the Senate spends more and the president refuses to use his veto. Moreover, some of those who condemn House spending are unwittingly condemning the House for getting behind the president’s big-government initiatives, including Medicare prescription drugs, expanded farm subsidies, and federalizing education.

We conservatives need to be honest with ourselves. If the House, the most conservative of the elected bodies, is not conservative enough, then the Republican Senate and the Bush presidency are worse. Yet I don’t hear much clamoring for sweeping the Senate clean or much criticism of the president from our corner. And the most effective politician at obstructing many conservative polices initiated by the House and the president is John McCain. But McCain is said to be among the top candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. Somehow he escapes the wrath of those who are frustrated with Republicans. As I write, he is busy traveling the country raising money, securing endorsements, and campaigning for, well, Republicans.”

After watching the Republican pundits “pile on” and patronize House majority whip Roy Blunt during the January leadership contest, I began to suspect many center-right bloggers of sharing some of the same class outlooks as their left-wing contemporaries.

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Last July 17, in one of the House of Representatives leadership’s less prescient moments, that body approved arguably the largest earmark of modern times — $1.5 billion to the management-challenged Metro transit system. This stand-alone package (HR 3496) authored by Representative Tom Davis and supported by Representative Frank Wolf, two Virginia Republicans, has a special gift for the unwary taxpayer. In Heritage’s Ron Utt’s words:

As troubling as this inequitable transfer would be, Mr. Davis’s proposal also requires that, as a condition of Metro receiving the $1.5 billion federal bailout, all communities in its service area establish a “dedicated funding source” (a euphemism for a tax increase) to match the federal subsidy.

The danger is that this succubus could be attached to a genuinely urgent Senate vehicle and slide through to the president’s desk where veto pens may still be on order, if not under construction. Mr. Davis has no shame about standing behind this measure, and, consistently, voted for greater transparency on earmarks last Thursday. Mr. Wolf, on the other hand, appparently believes that the less sunshine the better on such dark matters and voted the other way on sunshine.

Some old-line Virginia Republicans, even if not entirely comfortable with these raids on the U. S. Treasury in behalf of local outstretched hands, nonetheless object to such public scrutiny of Republican spending during an election year. What they entirely miss is that this kind of egregious spending jeopardizes the House Republican majority nationally even if such Congressional largesse may go down relatively smoothly in northern Virginia.

I’m going to make an assumption here, and it is that over the course of this blog’s life that there will likely be a fair share of criticism directed at members of both the executive and the legislative branches of the federal government. However, while we can criticize these members, and their staff, for foolish political decisions, I would propose that we also keep in mind the sacrifice their staffers make to work in Washington, D.C. - one of the most expensive cities in America - for what amounts to largely a paupers wage.

A new web page, Legistorm, by placing salary information online makes plain for all to see, the extent of this sacrifice.

Who is employed by Congress, and how much they are paid, is often a source of fascination for the politically aware. Prior to this site’s creation, members of the public needed to visit the document rooms of the House and the Senate in Washington, DC to discover who was being paid what. Now, all this information is available on the web - for residents of Alaska or Zanzibar - at the click of a mouse.

So, while I urge you to criticize the decision, I think any criticism must also be tempered by a respect to the extent most congressional staffers have forgone higher salaries in order to serve the common good.

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