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Government's Enforcement of Mandatory Speeding Law's

America is a country that is torn between doing what is safe and perhaps in the best interest of the nation versus what is the easiest way to accomplish the list of demands that faces almost every American on a daily basis. Sometimes the Federal Government has to step up to the plate and mandate some laws and take some action but once they do is there any way to turn back from them? The prices at the pump are astronomical, advertisements everywhere claim that speed kills yet most people are headed for the fast lane to make that next appointment regardless of the cost.

It was not until the 1970's when the government intervened and took away the regulation of speed on the nation's highways from the State Highway Departments. This was mainly done in an attempt to conserve energy by mandating a federal speed limit maximum of 55mph. It was decided that these transportation efforts must be in place to protect the environment. The Interstate as it was known soon became the National Highway System.

The years prior to the 1974 nationalization of the maximum highway speed were referred to nostalgically as

President Bill Clinton did not like this one bit but for other reasons signed the bill. Voicing the president's concerns, Secretary of Transportation Frederico Pena sent letters to governors, "imploring them, for safety reasons," to consider leaving the speed limits where they stood (qtd. in Kaye, Mulrine,

Although speed limits most immediately bring to mind the notion of public safety, this was not the concern of lawmakers at the time of the law's enactment. In fact, public safety did not even enter the original debate on the bill (Peters, 1995). The law was given a temporary status initially, to be a one-year fix for a problem presumed to be solved by diplomacy. As is so often with federal initiatives, the ephemeral experiment became the permanent policy, and the national speed limit was made indefinite in 1975 (Csere, 1995).

In 1994, for the first time since Dwight Eisenhower was in office, Republicans took control of both houses and the battle was on. One of their first ventures was to give the power of speed limits back to the states. From this was the birth of the 1995 National Highway

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