Capitol Hill was in a celebratory mood Wednesday as Congress moved closer to passage of the first long-term highway bill in a decade, but the moment was tempered by awareness that its patchwork funding is short of the mark.
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The Senate on Wednesday also passed a fentanyl trafficking bill – earlier approved by the House – which will toughen punishments for drug dealers who have been adding the synthetic opiate to heroin, which makes the drug more lethal.
Sen. Dan Wolf also bemoaned the process, describing senators as “under the gun to raise the cap” on net metering despite the Senate acting back in July to address the issue only to see it stall in the House until the second-to-last day of formal session. “My amendment tells the president that we don’t approve of bringing more people here from the Middle East until we have adequate controls on who’s here already”. However, Congress has an obligation to take leadership of the Highway Trust Fund, which has fallen victim, ironically, to fuel efficient vehicles, the abundance of cheap natural gas, and falling oil prices.
While President Obama denounced efforts to restrict the number of Syrian refugees, House speaker Paul Ryan defended the legislation as a simple matter of security. The Senate came up with 13 different sources, including selling 101 million barrels of oil from the federal Strategic Petroleum Reserve, reducing the amount of interest that the Federal Reserve pays to banks, and redirecting fees paid by airline passengers into the Highway Trust Fund.
Included in the new bill was an amendment from Sen.
Still, Rosenberg said, the Senate will work over the holiday session to “tee it up”, and he supports the concept of strengthening the state’s public records law.
The agreement, now known as the Every Student Succeeds Act, is expected to come to a vote in both chambers after the Thanksgiving recess. It would generate about $9.5 billion.
“In terms of timing, I think we’re in a good place”, Kocot said.
“47 Democrats Just Voted for Terror”, read the headline over Charles P. Pierce’s Esquire piece.
But under the proposal, states, not the federal government, would determine which actions to take in those struggling schools, and states would set goals and timelines for academic progress.
In addition to policy differences, the two overarching questions facing negotiators are funding mechanisms and authorization length.
Solar installers and environmentalists objected to the bill that passed the House Tuesday, saying it doesn’t go almost far enough to foster the growing solar industry. the more green-minded Senate then passed their own legislation that the solar industry was at least slightly warmer to.
Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who co-chair the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called the bill a direct assault on “a fundamental American value” which is to “provide a safe haven for our most vulnerable neighbors”.
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“Let’s face it; these terrorists have declared war on Western civilization and our very way of life”, he said.
