California’s high-speed rail project has always been about politics, not economics.

California Governor Jerry Brown’s beloved bullet train project has had a rough go of it lately. As public support for it has plummeted, he has inadvertently antagonized the environmentalists in his base while it gets tossed around by the courts. A pending appellate court review on Brown’s access to $8.6 billion in bond money will decide the next chapter in the bullet train saga, which stands today about where it did two years ago: without a credible source of funding or a good justification for why it’s necessary.