Still not on track
House Speaker John Boehner says that if the conference committee trying to hammer out a surface transportation bill can't work out their disagreements by the June 30 deadline, he will put forth yet another extension of the existing transportation bill to fund programs until after the November elections. It is looking as if he may have to do just that. The 47-member committee of representatives and senators seems unable to compromise.
The existing transportation bill, passed in 2005, expired in 2009 and has been temporarily extended nine times. The last time was March 29, when House Republicans pushed through a 90-day extension because of opposition to a bill within their own ranks and from most Democrats. That extension expires in 12 days. House Republicans have backed a five-year, $260 billion plan, but even though it emerged from the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, it has never made it to the House floor for a full vote. The Senate has passed a two-year, $109 billion bill. The House-Senate conference committee is charged with coming up with something that enough members of both parties can accept.
And that is looking as impossible as it turned out to be in March.
Many Democrats, mass transit advocates and other critics view the House bill as a transportation and environmental disaster. Among other things, it would provide 21 percent less inflation-adjusted spending than the 2005 bill, slash environmental oversight and pay for some projects out of revenue from public land newly opened to oil and gas drilling. The Democrats also oppose a Republican persistent attempt to mandate immediate approval of the Keystone XL pipeline that would transport tar sands oil from Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast. A large proportion of House Republicans in the tea party wing don't like the bill because they don't think it cuts spending enough.
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Getting 47 conferees to agree is a tall order. But, according to The Hill, the hoary tactic of putting bargaining over the toughest issues dividing the conferees into the hands of the Senate and House leadership may not be enough this time to make a difference:
“I think the bill’s dead,” a transportation industry source said to The Hill on Friday. “I don’t think they can fix what they have in front of them. Kicking it up to the leadership probably gives it a chance…but every time they get to the five-yard line, they move the goal posts back.” [...]
The escalation of the public rhetoric between the chambers’ leading negotiators caused Associated General Contractors of America spokesman Brian Turmail to worry Friday that the tradition of bumping intractable issues up to leadership may not work in the contentious highway negotiations.
“If it required four people to get in a room to get a deal, we would’ve already had a deal,” he said. “Our sense is the leadership has obviously been involved, but I don’t know if it’s as simple as ‘if leadership gets [more] involved, you’ll automatically get a break.’”
One issue, the
National Journal reports, is hang-ups over "streamlining":
One of the key hurdles to compromise, House Republicans say, is finding common ground on their environmental streamlining measures.
"On five of our priorities, we have offered a counterproposal.... On three of them it's been a flat 'no,' and on a couple of the others, it's been a very, very minor movement," Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., a conferee, said last week.
Without an agreement by the deadline, authorization runs out for the government to collect the 18.4 cents-a-gallon gas tax that covers federal spending for mass transit and road-building. Hence the need for another extension to avoid massive layoffs of both private and public employees that such a cutoff in funds would entail.
While all this dickering is going on, our leaders aren't even touching on what is really needed:
Meanwhile, our major modes of transportation poison us, burn two-thirds of the oil we drill at home and import from abroad, make us less secure because of the geopolitics involved in maintaining access to much of that oil, gobble up a scarce resource essential for making other products, extract large hunks of household income and contribute a third of the CO2 we’re loading into the atmosphere.
Rethinking transportation means rethinking zoning and other aspects of how we build our cities and develop the land in between. It demands a hard look at subsidies that promote particular modes of transportation to the exclusion of others and broadening the definition of what a subsidy is. Rethinking transportation requires rethinking the currently inadequate public revenue streams that pay for most of its infrastructure. And, obviously, it means extricating ourselves from dependence on fossil fuel, not just the imported stuff but what we take out of the ground within our own borders and from beneath the continental shelves.
Those are the sorts of issues that are unlikely to get a fair hearing even after November.