Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The House of Representatives voted to subtract $785 million from the transportation budget this week, trimming dollars from transit, New Starts and highway safety programs as part of a “continuing resolution” measure that will set spending levels through 2013.

South Dakota's Tim Johnson is part of a group of powerful senators who oppose a House measure that would slash transportation funding. Image: Senator Tim Johnson

The vote, coming on the heels of last week’s mandatory budget cuts from the sequester, goes against the funding requirements set by MAP-21, the two-year transportation bill that was laboriously pounded out last year.

The legislation passed 267-151 margin, with 50 Democrats voting yea.

The bill’s passage in the House met with some consternation in the upper chamber. Senators Jay Rockefeller, Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Tim Johnson (D-SD) — chairs of the Commerce, Environment and Public Works, and Banking Committees, respectively — responded to the bill’s introduction earlier this week with a letter condemning the cuts and calling for a restoration of the funding. In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, the trio said the funding cuts would cost the country 25,000 jobs.

The last continuing resolution, which funded the first six months of FY 2013, also cut funding below the levels agreed upon in the transportation bill. But this time the cuts go further, the senators said in the letter:

Last September, we wrote to voice our concerns that the FY 2013 continuing resolution to fund the government through March 27, 2013, failed to honor the funding levels included in MAP-21. The reduction of funding included in that continuing resolution resulted in states receiving fewer funds to repair their roads and bridges and put construction workers back to work, and shortchanges critical transportation safety programs. At that time, according to CQ, a Republican spokesman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee stated that the appropriate spending levels would be “overridden when a full-year transportation appropriations bill is enacted.”

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Did you notice the big white beard and jolly red cheeks on President Obama at the State of the Union the other night? He’s the new Santa Claus, giving out gifts the government can’t afford to greedy little kids everywhere.

That’s how House Speaker John Boehner sees the president’s latest proposal for infrastructure investment — $40 billion for maintenance, under a strict “fix it first” ethic, with no revenue stream attached to it.

“Trying to find a funding source to repair the nation’s infrastructure is still a big goal of mine,” Boehner told reporters yesterday. “And the president talked about infrastructure, but he didn’t talk about how to pay for it. It’s easy to go out there and be Santa Claus and talk about all these things you want to give away, but at some point, somebody’s got to pay the bill.”

This is exactly what happened on Valentine’s Day two years ago, when President Obama rolled out his six-year transportation budget proposal. The spending side of the ledger was enthusiastically filled in — but the revenue side? Crickets.

As we said at the time, bold and innovative infrastructure proposals are great but it doesn’t really help anything, in these lean times, to promise the moon and then offer nothing in the way of realistic funding.

Now, Boehner’s not blameless in all this. He says he’s looking for a funding source, but only if it rhymes with “soil shilling.” Foil filling? Oil drilling. That’s right. Otherwise, he’s only too happy to cut transportation spending by a third — and next time around, it’ll be an even bigger cut than that. It’s certainly disappointing that Congressional Democrats and the White House have been afraid to come out in favor of a gas tax hike, but it’s not as if Boehner’s been pushing for sensible revenue measures either.

Forty billion dollars for transportation maintenance is a worthy goal. It could hold at bay the calls for highway expansion and help the country get more out of the infrastructure we have, while saving ourselves bigger expenditures on replacement when poorly maintained infrastructure finally needs to go. It could even have big benefits for bicycling.

If we can’t find the money to pay for this, what will we find the money for? U.S. DOT’s plan for 3,000 new miles of highway?

UPDATE 1:47 p.m.: Speaker Boehner just sent out an email to reporters, highlighting media reports of his comments that assert that he doesn’t intend to raise tax rates. It clarifies his position that the election doesn’t equal a “mandate for raising tax rates” on the American people. 

In a move likely calculated to distract attention away from the post-election chatter about the Republican party’s state of crisis, Majority Leader John Boehner made a surprise announcement yesterday. “Because the American people expect us to find common ground,” he said, “we are willing to accept some additional revenues, via tax reform.” The reform would be part of a deal to avoid the impending “fiscal cliff.”

Is John Boehner talking sense on taxes, or is he just talking? Photo: Twitter/SpeakerJohnBoehner

The fiscal cliff is a murky cocktail made up of the expirations of tax cuts and unemployment benefits, combined with the “sequestration” cuts that are harmful enough that the mere thought of them was supposed to be incentive enough for Congress to find some other way to tame the deficit last August. Unfortunately, Congress being Congress, they didn’t, and the sequestered cuts could kick in at the end of the year if nothing is done.

What this means for surface transportation isn’t completely clear. The aviation sector faces the loss of 2,200 air traffic controllers and support staff and the Coast Guard — still reeling from some heroic missions after Hurricane Sandy — could get a $439 million chunk taken out of its hide. But surface transportation is somewhat sheltered from these cuts because of its dedicated funding source, the Highway Trust Fund.

However, given that nearly $14 billion of the current bill’s $105 billion outlay comes from sources other than the Highway Trust Fund, experts speculate that even standard transportation expenditures could fall victim to the cuts — not to mention non-trust-fund programs like Amtrak, New Starts and TIGER.

So it’s refreshing to hear the leader of the House Republicans say they’re willing to back off their hard-line Grover Norquist kow-towing on taxes and explore all the options on the table. That could reduce the severity of the cuts required and, who knows, if we’re opening up a conversation about some targeted tax hikes, maybe someone will notice that there’s a gas tax that’s been begging for some adjustment for almost 20 years now.

But what did Boehner really say?

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The MAP-21 transportation bill was just signed two months ago, and its funding levels, agreed to by a difficult and fragile compromise between warring political parties, are already under attack.

Sen. Boxer toured a BART construction project last month in San Jose. Photo courtesy of Office of Sen. Barbara Boxer.

In Congress, authorization and budgeting are two different processes, run out of different committees. And right now, House budgeters are looking to shave down the $52.6 billion a year MAP-21 allocated for transportation. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who presided over the passage of MAP-21, would like to see those authorized numbers stay sacrosanct.

Meanwhile, Congress is bound by the Budget Control Act, passed by Congress last summer as part of the debt ceiling deal, to cap overall funding levels at $1.047 trillion for next year. The House is working on a six-month continuing resolution to fund the federal government at that level for FY2013. (That’s the way Congress has been passing budgets lately – since they can’t agree on a real budget, they just pass continuing resolutions and agree to keep the previous year’s budget, sometimes with a little tinkering.)

The House’s continuing resolution would cut transportation funding half a billion dollars below MAP-21 levels.

In a letter sent yesterday to House Speaker John Boehner, Boxer reminded him that MAP-21 was “bipartisan legislation which passed the House of Representatives with an overwhelming vote of 373-52” and that it “included an inflationary adjustment for fiscal years 2013 and 2014” which the House bill “failed to protect.”

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Out of thin air, House Speaker John Boehner sent an email yesterday with the subject line, “Labor Day Pain: Gas Prices Have Doubled on President Obama’s Watch.” As evidence of the “doubling” charge, Boehner links to his own website, where he claims, “The average price for a gallon of gasoline was $1.85 when President Obama took office.”

Technically, he’s right. There was a sudden and temporary drop in gas prices just at the end of President Bush’s term — probably because there was a massive global recession at the end of President Bush’s term.

Gas prices are actually just about where they were Labor Day 2008, when George W. Bush was president. Source: Gas Buddy

You know who really gets this? Mitt Romney, that’s who. Don’t expect any reality-based commentary like this out of him these days, but back when he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney “responded to price spikes by describing them as the natural result of global market pressures and by calling for increases in fuel efficiency,” according to Alec MacGillis, writing in The New Republic this spring. Under pressure to call for a gas tax holiday when prices were high in 2006, Romney thought better of it. MacGillis quotes Romney:

“I don’t think that now is the time, and I’m not sure there will be the right time, for us to encourage the use of more gasoline,” Romney said, according to the Quincy Patriot Ledger’s report at the time. “I’m very much in favor of people recognizing that these high gasoline prices are probably here to stay.”

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House Speaker John Boehner spoke to reporters yesterday morning. His message: “Republicans Relentlessly Focused on Jobs.”

John Boehner says there will be no more flowers on his watch. Photo: Human Flower Project

“House Republicans want to get a highway bill done,” he said. “We want a bill, and our colleagues are working toward producing a bill. We just want to make sure it’s a bill that includes real reforms, to ensure that taxpayer funds are paying for legitimate projects that support economic activity – not planting more flowers and beautification projects around the country.”

Of course, Boehner is hiding behind the “no flower” argument to mask the House GOP’s real objective — dismantling the Senate transportation bill’s provisions for street safety programs, which are funded from the same pot as “scenic beautification” projects. The GOP’s true target — the Cardin-Cochran amendment — gives local agencies control over funds from programs to make streets safer for walking and biking, including Safe Routes to School and Transportation Enhancements. Those funds go toward transportation projects that save people money, reduce congestion, improve air quality, and combat obesity.

Not only does that money go a long way in terms of building infrastructure and getting results, it also produces more construction jobs per dollar than highway spending. So maybe Boehner is not really focused on jobs — “Relentlessly Focused on Fossil Fuels” is more like it. In his comments, Boehner added that the House GOP also supports “bipartisan, job-creating initiatives like the Keystone pipeline” — which is expected to create about 6,000 jobs. (Hardly enough to have a real impact on the nation’s unemployment, when last month’s job growth of 69,000 was considered extremely weak.)

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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.

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Last week, when House Speaker John Boehner indicated his willingness to bring up the Senate transportation bill, it seemed like an admission of defeat for the brazenly partisan approach and insanely destructive policies the Republicans have been promoting. But it’s not over yet.

Check out the nuances of Boehner’s statement, quoted in The Hill last Thursday:

Will Boehner bring the House bill back from the dead? Photo: Cincinnati.com

“As I told the members yesterday, the current plan is to see what the Senate can produce and to bring their bill up,” Boehner told reporters at his weekly news conference Thursday.

“In the meantime, we’re going to continue to have conversations with our members about a longer term approach, which frankly most of our members want. But at this point in time, the plan is to bring up the Senate bill – or something like it.”

House members are away from the Capitol this week on recess, but this is when the GOP leadership is having those “conversations.” And when Boehner said he’ll be discussing a “longer term approach,” what he means is a bill that gives short shrift to transit, biking, and walking so the House can squeeze out more money for highways — and hence more years of spending for their bill.

The GOP bill has too much oil drilling to win votes from the Democratic side of the aisle. But if leadership can buy time to convince enough hesitant Republicans that they’re better off supporting Boehner’s bill than the bipartisan Senate bill, they could yet gather together enough votes to set up a showdown with the Senate.

So if you want to protect policies that invest in transit and safe streets, this is no time to rest on your laurels. Even with the House in recess, advocates are gearing up for a last push this week to make sure the bill is really, truly dead.

The original six-year House transportation bill had funding levels that were too low, so House leaders axed that and came up with a fairy tale bill in which oil drilling would pay for higher transportation spending levels. Then they decided to kick transit funding out of that bill, which didn’t fly. So they thought about replacing the whole kit and kaboodle with an 18-month bill, but no one liked that either.

As of this morning, Speaker John Boehner was supposedly trying to round up votes for another five-year bill. It looks like he couldn’t find them, according to Fox News reporter Chad Pergram, so now the House may take up something more like the Senate’s 18-month bill:

The five-year bill that Boehner tried and failed to get his GOP colleagues to pass yesterday preserved dedicated funding for transit, but it didn’t really solve any of the other contentious issues with the previous bills (except, thankfully, for the double-decker horse trailer issue.) It kept oil drilling, which Democrats oppose, and didn’t lower the $260 billion price tag, which conservatives bristle at.

Perhaps the bill’s downfall, however, was leadership’s commitment to keeping it earmark-free. Though many analysts would call that a noble route, it leaves members without specific projects in their districts that they can use to sell the bill to their constituents. Ironically, without some local pork thrown in, a federal transportation bill looks like a big hunk of Washington pork to many members of Boehner’s caucus.

No one in House leadership wants to vote for the Senate bill, but that appears to be their only option, as yet another internal proposal dies. The House could try to pass an 18-month or two-year extension, but Politico reports that such a measure would have a “rocky road to passage.” It would basically implement the Senate bill’s funding levels (or close to it) but without a way of paying for it, leaving the Highway Trust Fund vulnerable to insolvency before the extension even expired.

One way or another, it looks like an 18-month bill — basically a glorified extension — has a path to passage now.

UPDATE 12:00: Leaders did not introduce a bill, but outlined their plan in rather vague terms. More to come.

At 11:15 this morning, House Speaker John Boehner, House Transportation Chair John Mica, Natural Resources Chair Doc Hastings (R-WA) and Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH) will take the podium to unveil their transportation and energy bill. It’s likely to take the basic outline of the bill Mica announced in the summer, add enough money (about $15 billion a year) to maintain current spending levels (though not necessarily accounting for inflation, as Sen. Barbara Boxer’s bill does) and give some sense, at least, of how they’ll pay for that extra $15 billion.

According to Transportation Nation‘s Todd Zwillich, the leaders will introduce a five-year bill — not a six-year bill, which Mica had militantly supported, but still much longer than the two-year life span of the Senate bill. Industry officials from trucking, construction, and other sectors have generally supported the longer time horizon in the House bill and the more robust funding levels in the Senate bill. If the House matches those funding levels, that could swing industry support squarely over to the House bill. The major roadblock, of course, is the controversial and unproven way the GOP plans to pay for it.

Democrats will surely balk at the plan to raise transportation money by expanding energy production, but the fossil fuel industry is sure to throw its full weight behind it.

Stivers’ presence at the press conference settles speculation as to which oil-drilling-for-infrastructure-money bill the Republicans would choose. It seems Stivers’ bill has won out. A Natural Resources subcommittee will hold a hearing on his bill tomorrow.

The plan the GOP leaders announce this morning will set their agenda for the rest of the year. Boehner has already said he wants the bill passed by the end of the year.