GOP's Add-ons to Transportation Bill Provide a Reality Check

Both parties and both houses of Congress appear to have worked through their differences and are poised to extend a payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits and avoid drastic cuts in reimbursement rates for physicians treating Medicare enrollees.

The optimist thinks, "So Congress can deal with real problems, even in a campaign year."

The pessimist thinks, "The Republicans' radical wing already lost this fight in December, and party leaders saw no reason to follow the fringe to a repeat defeat in February. It's all politics."

The realist looks at the House Republicans' transportation bill and thinks, "The inmates are still running the asylum."

The $262 billion bill to fund highway and other transportation projects for the next 4 1/2 years was introduced in the House earlier this month. It was "credited" to Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

One of its looniest provisions would eliminate the transportation funding mechanism signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. That process directs about $40 billion each year to the Highway Trust Fund from federal excise taxes on gasoline (18.4 cents per gallon) and diesel fuel (24.4 cents per gallon). Eighty percent of it goes for highway and bridge projects; 20 percent supports buses, light-rail lines, passenger trains, subways, bicycle lanes and trails and other alternative means of transportation.

Mica's House bill would channel 100 percent of future fuel taxes to roads, leaving nothing for mass transit or other modes of transportation that save money, save energy, improve air quality, improve health and make cities and neighborhoods more desirable places to live and conduct business.

Apparently House Republicans see traveling in anything but a car or truck as suspiciously green.

The House bill also would turn the offshore waters of the United States — and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — into a free-fire zone for oil and gas drilling.

The bill says royalties from the wells will make up for gas tax shortfalls, but a Congressional Budget Office estimate released Monday said the House bill would put the trust fund into the red in fewer than 10 years.

Ray LaHood, the former seven-term Republican congressman from Illinois who serves as secretary of Transportation in the Obama administration, told Politico it was "the worst transportation bill I've ever seen during 35 years of public service."

LaHood wasn't the only one saying so. The National League of Cities, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the National Association of Counties and the Episcopal Church were among hundreds of groups publicly criticizing the bill.

As recently as Monday, both the House and Senate were scheduled to vote on their respective bills this week, but by Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, was scrambling to prevent a legislative train wreck.

As a strategic move, the House bill was broken into three pieces, and Boehner delayed a vote until next week. A sensible Senate version started out as a collaboration between Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., ideological foes who found enough common ground to devise a two-year, $109 billion bill to fund desperately needed highway and transit infrastructure projects.

But now the Senate bill has been larded down with unrelated matters. Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, for example, is among the co-sponsors of an amendment that would override new regulations requiring workplace health insurance policies to cover birth control services at no cost to employees who choose to use them.

You are not alone in wondering what this has to do with America's transportation needs.

It is tempting to see the payroll tax compromise as a hopeful sign. Think of the transportation bills as a reality check.

 

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