Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Another day, another another twist in the House’s efforts to pass a transportation bill.

John Mica and John Boehner have repeatedly stumbled this week in their efforts to pass a stopgap measure . Photo: Zimbio

Yesterday’s postponed vote on a 60-day extension had initially been rescheduled for tonight, but that too will be scrapped, making it the third time the House has punted a vote on an extension in as many days. House transportation committee chairman John Mica told reporters today that he was still planning to bring a two-month stopgap to a vote, but then changed his tune according to Transportation Nation:

Minutes later, Mica returned to say he was “recalculating,” and that he would also file a 90-day straight extension to the existing highway bill. Mica had talked it over with GOP leaders and said the 90-day extension is what he “was told to do.” Republican aides said part of the issue was that a 60-day extension would likely expire while Congress was out of town on the Memorial Day recess, complicating efforts to get a House-Senate agreement on a final Highway bill.

The House Rules Committee will meet today at 5:30 to set rules for tomorrow’s debate and vote, which in all likelihood will only require 218 votes to pass. It would then go to the Senate, whose members are understandably bitter that their own two-year bill, which passed 74-22 in bipartisan fashion, will not be voted on in the House — but not so bitter as to close the door on an extension.

Transportation funding, as well as the federal gas tax, are due to expire at the stroke of midnight Sunday if no agreement can be reached on an extension. The House leaves for Easter recess on Friday, making tomorrow the last chance to vote on anything.

In the Senate, many swing states and some solid GOP strongholds produced votes in favor of a two-year transportation bill. The House GOP leadership hasn't budged. Image: T4A

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, Congressional Democrats, some Congressional Republicans, unions, politicians from New Jersey, Chicago and Louisiana — they all have one message for the House of Representatives: Pass the Senate transportation bill.

President Obama made it a key part of his weekly address this Sunday, pointing out that the economy would “take a hit” without a full reauthorization. The Transportation Trades Department, a coalition of 32 labor unions, said it is “an outrage” that the House is delaying taking up the Senate’s bipartisan two-year bill. The National League of Cities urged the House to act in time for the spring construction season.

It’s widely considered a longshot that the House will pass the Senate bill, but if the momentum is shifting at all, it seems to be moving in that direction. On Monday three House Republicans — Reps. Charlie Bass (NH), Judy Biggert (IL), and Robert Dold (IL) — joined Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) in a letter to Speaker Boehner [PDF], pleading with the House to pass the Senate bill.

Meanwhile, the House GOP leadership appears to be floundering. With movement conservatives taking cues from groups like the Heritage Foundation, which is firmly opposed the Senate bill, the Republican base hasn’t budged. But the stubborn refusal to go in a bipartisan direction is starting to call to mind fights — the debt ceiling fiasco, the payroll tax brinkmanship — that damaged the House GOP’s standing. Earlier this month Politico called the House’s inability to move a reauthorization proposal out of its own chamber “Exhibit A” in “Republican Dysfunction.”

Since then, the chamber hasn’t looked much more functional. Boehner pulled a 60-day extension off the table yesterday when he failed to get the necessary votes. House Democrats were trying to force a vote on the Senate bill, but observers predict the House will cobble together a majority along partisan lines before the buzzer at week’s end. After that, it’s anyone’s guess how the end game will play out.

It’s like Congressional Whack-a-Mole: Transportation bills pop up just long enough to offer a fleeting glimpse before they retract back into oblivion.

Yesterday’s vote on a 90-day extension of federal transportation funding was pulled at the last second, then replaced by a vote today on a 60-day extension. That extension even made it to the floor for debate (though out of sequence with the Majority Leader’s schedule) before it, too, was postponed.

House debated 60-day extension this afternoon but did not vote on it. They’re postponing until later in the week.

— Transport. 4 America (@T4America) March 27, 2012

Remember, Republicans first failed to get 218 out of 244 Republicans to vote for their five-year transportation bill in the six weeks since it was approved in committee. Then, they tried to get 290 votes for a short-term stopgap, but they couldn’t. So today, they thought they could hit 290 votes with an even shorter-term stopgap.

“What do they expect to achieve over the next eight weeks that they were unable to do in the last six weeks?” asked Rep. Nick Rahall, top Democrat on the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, during floor debate. Democrats invoked Eisenhower and Jefferson in their attacks on the stopgap, instead urging a vote on the two-year Senate bill that passed with bipartisan support, but that is currently collecting dust on the House clerk’s desk.

With the House GOP seemingly unwilling to take up the Senate bill, they will likely wait until they only need a simple majority to pass an extension, and in all probability they will pass it along party lines. But the Senate still has to pass an extension of their own to keep transportation funding from expiring at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday.

“There may be more twists and turns,” Larry Ehl writes at Transportation Issues Daily, “but it’s safe to assume an extension of some length WILL be enacted by the end of the week.”

False alarm…

House Republicans delay Monday’s vote on short-term highway bill t.co/re597esi

— The Hill (@hilltransport) March 26, 2012

Route on highway bill still unclear. Boehner spox says a “vote on an extension will occur later this week rather than tonight.”

— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) March 26, 2012

It looks like some dealmaking may still be in the works. Like we said, on a dime.

Congress has five days in which to pass an extension of transportation funding. That means there will be a flurry of activity on the Hill this week to avoid a shutdown of federal transportation programs on April 1. (It also means there will be a flurry of “April Fools” references directed by and at opposing political parties on the House and Senate floors.)

Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell could use endless extensions to whittle away the value of the Senate transportation bill. Photo: Bloomberg

Just to remind everyone where things stand, the Senate has passed, in a 74-22 vote, a two-year transportation bill that the House GOP doesn’t like. Meanwhile, the House has offered up a 90-day extension of current funding that Senate Democrats don’t like. House Republicans are expected to use their extension to buy time for their five-year bill that almost nobody likes.

The House leadership will make its first attempt to pass the 90-day extension today. Technically, since the bill isn’t on the schedule yet, the vote would be “under suspension of the rules,” and require a two-thirds majority to pass, or 290 votes. The Republicans only control 244 seats, so for the bill to pass today, at least 46 Democrats would have to support it.

Why wouldn’t the Democrats support it? Because they don’t want to be seen as withdrawing their support for the Senate bill. But if the extension doesn’t pass today, House Republicans will try to paint the Democrats as supporting a government shutdown, and the House would still bring the bill up later in the week.

But that creates a new wrinkle, because, according to Politico, the Senate is working on a shorter extension, maybe as short as 45 days, to protect its larger bill. If the House’s extension doesn’t pass today, that means there would be very little time to reconcile two extensions of different lengths, after all the Senate’s procedural votes are done with.

Why the desire for a shorter extension? Because every extension eats away at the Senate bill’s value as a long-term reauthorization measure. The Senate’s two-year bill would go into effect retroactively to September 30, 2011, meaning that even if it were to be signed into law tomorrow, it will only be in effect for 18 months. Tack on a 90-day extension, and what is nominally a two-year bill would in reality be a 15-month bill. Another 90 day extension to the August recess would reduce the Senate bill to little more than a one-year deal, and any extensions beyond that would effectively kill the Senate bill altogether.

So, to recap: The fight between the House and Senate right now has likely boiled down to a fight between a 90-day extension and a 45-or-60-day extension. Five days remain on the clock and anything can change on a dime, minute to minute. Stay tuned.

Reps. John Mica, Dave Camp, and John Duncan have formally introduced a bill that would extend federal transportation programs until June 30, without any changes to funding, policy, or gas taxes. It is officially known as H.R. 4239.

House foot-dragging on passing a transportation bill is getting repetitive. Photo: The|G|uk/flickr

The 90-day extension would be the ninth passed since the last long-term transportation bill, SAFETEA-LU, expired in September 2009. The House passed the eighth extension of SAFETEA-LU in September 2011 by an unrecorded voice vote. No date has been set for debate or floor votes, but the extension does get a mention in Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s schedule for next week.

Mica’s proposal was introduced just one day after his Democratic counterpart on the Tranpsortation & Infrastructure Committee, Nick Rahall, introduced the Senate’s two-year bill in the House as H.R. 14. House Republicans have justified their opposition to the Senate bill by claiming they still prefer a five-year reauthorization, but the have not yet found a way to pay for it — the gas tax alone will not be able to cover five years of transportation funding at current levels.

In fact, Politico reported this morning that the Congressional Budget Office predicts the Highway Trust Fund’s balance will hit zero sometime in the summer of 2013 — which is even before the Senate bill expires. The Senate does not need to change their bill to accommodate the new estimate (they knew this would happen and built a cushion into the bill for just that purpose), but further extensions will only make it harder to stretch the trust fund to cover costs.

With both houses needing to raise new money for underfunded transportation programs, the question arises: What would Reagan do?

Two press releases from the House seem to indicate that members have emerged from recess intending to do something other than nothing. The first is from Transportation and Infrastructure chairman John Mica:

Tomorrow, I will introduce a short-term extension through June 30^th to ensure continuity of current programs while I and House Republicans continue to work toward a responsible transportation bill that provides long-term certainty, reduces the size of government, eliminates earmarks, and is fully paid for. We continue to believe that linking energy and infrastructure is the responsible thing to do in order to meet our long-term needs

The extension is expected to be a “clean” one, without any funding or policy changes from current law.

Simultaneously, House Democrats have introduced the Senate bill, now christened H.R. 14:

“With more than 2.7 million construction and manufacturing workers out of work, enough with the political games. With tens of millions more seeking a better life, it is far past the time to stop the brinkmanship,” said U.S. Representative Nick J. Rahall (D-WV), top Democrat on the Committee and cosponsor of the bill. “If Congress does not act, the highway, transit, and safety programs will shut down a week from Saturday, on March 31. Let us seize the moment to move forward, without procedural gimmicks, without partisan political posturing, and do what is right for America. Let us do our jobs so that the American people can go back to theirs.  Let us send the Senate bill to the President.”

The two announcements mark the first flurry of activity on a House transportation bill since February, when H.R. 7 seemed to fizzle out somewhere between the committee room and the House floor. As Republican Congressman Tom Petri said at the National Bike Summit this morning, it is still likely that the House will pass an extension before any other bill.

It looks like everyone who bet on “extension” can collect their winnings.

Chairman John Mica is still trying to write a five-year transportation bill, and the House is on course to buy time for him to do it. Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland

As expected, the House will not vote on the Senate’s transportation bill before the current transportation law expires on March 31, opting instead to buy more time with a stopgap measure. They will likely use that time to try whip up support for a five-year bill that funnels money toward highways and away from city streets and transit systems.

John Mica, chairman of the House transportation committee, told reporters after today’s Rally for Roads that “a decision will be made on the length of an extension hopefully in the next 24 hours and it will be up next week,” according to The Hill.

Politico caught up with a few members and heard much the same:

Bill Shuster, a top House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee member, thought it likely the House first goes for a clean extension of perhaps 45-60 days. “I think we’d get Democratic votes for it,” he said, adding, it “will give us some time to continue working toward a five-year bill, which we think is the key to passing it in the House.”

The move is not particularly surprising, given how the House has ground to a halt over the last few weeks.

Almost this exact same situation unfolded last summer with the federal aviation bill — then, too, the Senate approved a bill long before the House, who opted for a short-term extension rather than a long-term bill. At that point, however, the Senate refused to play ball, and federal aviation programs went into shutdown.

So far, all parties have voiced their unwillingness to see another shutdown. But the Senate may still try to write some of their reforms into any extension the House brings forward, and then it would be the House’s turn to play ball.

So much for bipartisanship.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is just waiting to pounce on Speaker Boehner for taking up Democratic legislation like the Senate transportation bill. Photo: Plain Dealer

Even though his efforts to whip his party into passing a five-year transportation bill that attacks transit, biking, and walking have been fruitless, House Speaker John Boehner isn’t about to follow through on his threat to take up the Senate’s two-year bill. That bill passed with 22 GOP ayes (and 22 nays) in the Senate earlier this week.

Politico reported this morning that the House Transportation Committee still plans to take up something resembling Boehner’s disastrous HR 7, but not before the eighth extension of SAFETEA-LU expires at the end of this month. The earliest the House plans to take up their bill is April 16, after the Easter recess – and it could be long after that.

While a Boehner spokesperson said no final decision had been reached, Joshua Schank of the Eno Center for Transportation said the speaker’s threat to take up the Senate bill was always an empty one. “The Republican caucus would have revolted against it and Boehner would have lost this job,” Schank said. “If [the Senate bill] passed [in the House], it would have passed because Democrats had voted for it. [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor is breathing down his neck. If that happens, he’ll just say, ‘Look, you passed a bill that was a Democratic bill; it wasn’t a Republican bill. So he should be out; what kind of Republican leader is that?’”

Politico says the House will introduce a measure to extend SAFETEA-LU yet again the week of March 26, to give them time to pass their own bill. But there are several ways this plan could fail.

First, the Senate could very well obstruct the extension. Everyone involved has been pledging for many months now that there would be no more extensions. The Senate has done its job. Rather than enable the House to take up more and more time pushing its unpopular five-year bill, the Senate could play hardball and force the House’s hand. At that point, the House would either have to take up the Senate bill or let the nation’s transportation program lapse – at the cost of an estimated 847,294 jobs.

Read more…

Now that the Senate has passed a transportation bill and everyone’s waiting to see what the House will do next, Transportation for America has done us all a great service and compared the Senate’s bill to the House’s — well, to the last thing the House showed us before things fell apart for John Boehner’s extreme attack on transit, biking, and walking.

The T4A analysis breaks down each bill, policy by policy, and lays out any pending amendments to the House bill that could potentially change it for the better.

Here’s an excerpt from their detailed comparison:

Public transportation & transit-oriented development

Senate: Continues dedicated funding for public transportation at traditional 20 percent share. Creates some new flexibility to spend federal funds on operations, i.e., keeping buses and trains running, not just buying new equipment. A new transit-oriented development planning program was incorporated into the bill via the Banking title.

House: Original bill ends 30 years of dedicated funding for public transit (read the letter we organized by more than 600 groups and individuals opposing this). Allows loans for transit-oriented development as an eligible expense under the TIFIA loan program. It doesn’t provide large transit operators with any flexibility to spend federal money on operating their transit systems.

Possible House amendment fix:  LaTourette/Carnahan 16 would allow all transit agencies to use a portion of their federal transit funding for operating expenses during times of economic crisis. (This amendment is similar to this bill the two representatives offered back in 2011.)

Walking and bicycling, local control of funds

Senate: Due in part to this amendment offered by Senators Cardin and Cochran and incorporated into the bill, MAP-21 consolidates programs for making biking and walking safer (as well as for other small local projects) and gives 50 percent of this consolidated program directly to metro areas. States and metro areas must create a competitive grant process to distribute that funding to local communities that apply. The Commerce Committee title also includes a new Complete Streets provision.

House: Eliminates most dedicated funding for bicycling & walking. Those uses remain “eligible” but without any dedicated funding for them. The bill also deletes numerous references throughout the bill that encourage multimodal projects. The bill retains the Recreational Trails program.

Possible House amendment fix: Petri-Blumenauer 103 creates consolidated program for bike/ped and other local projects and provides local governments access to new consolidated pot of funding.

Read the rest here.