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Article snippet: The House rejected a conservative proposal late Wednesday night to eliminate $1.1 billion in federal subsidies for Amtrak. An amendment offered by Rep. MORE (R-Ala.) to a government spending package for the next fiscal year failed on a 128-293 vote with a bipartisan coalition uniting in opposition. Brooks, a member of the House Freedom Caucus who failed to advance in the Alabama Senate GOP primary last month, argued that Amtrak subsidies were unnecessary. “Stated differently, what policy justification is there for forcing Americans who don’t use Amtrak to subsidize the travel of Americans who do use Amtrak? I know of none,” Brooks said during House floor debate. “We don’t give these kinds of subsidies to people who ride on airplanes,” he added. But Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), the chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Department of Transportation, said Brooks’s amendment would be counterproductive. While Diaz-Balart diplomatically called Brooks “sincere,” he said that eliminating Amtrak’s federal subsidies would actually result in higher costs. “This bill is not just arbitrary decisions. You see, we held hearings. And we carefully scrubbed each account to make sure that the reductions that we made were responsible and that were actually going to result in reductions,” Diaz-Balart said. “This is not the right way to do it,” Diaz-Balart said of the proposal offered by Brooks. “It is not prudent to eliminate an entire transportatio... Link to the full article to read more