Both parties were scheduled to discuss the bill at separate luncheons. Barbara Boxer of California have reached an agreement on a transportation bill.
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With just 12 days until highway funding is due to expire, the House and Senate appear on a collision course over how to keep current and future transportation projects afloat. Bevin, a Louisville businessman, past year tried but failed to wrest away McConnell’s Senate seat in a bruising Republican primary.
As July 31 – the date on which the Highway Trust Fund will run out of money – approaches, it is becoming increasingly less likely that the Senate’s approach will win the day.
The House, meanwhile, passed a short-term measure that would reauthorize the highway program until the end of 2015.
About 100 projects totaling $447 million are on hold in Georgia this year due to the federal funding uncertainty.
But McConnell said late Tuesday he hoped that the House would be happy with the bipartisan bill the Senate is working on and consider passing it before leaving town for the August recess. See the full press release here.
The Senate has yet to detail how it would pay for the $275 billion, six-year plan.
Conservatives are spoiling for a fight if McConnell attempts to attach the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank to the highway bill, as McConnell suggested he would try.
SHEPHERDSVILLE, Ky. (AP) The Senate’s top Republican said Monday the “gender card alone” won’t be enough to propel Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton to the White House.
But McConnell’s Democratic counterpart in the Senate, Minority Leader Harry Reid, said: “Based on my conversations with the Democrats in the House (of Representatives) and their conversations with Republican leaders, I don’t think there’s a chance in the world they’re going to take up this bill”.
The GOP-led House has reportedly already passed such a bill, but it would fund programs only through mid-December. The federal government typically spends about $50 billion per year on transportation projects, but the gas tax only brings in approximately $34 billion annually.
Senators voting against cloture wanted more time to read the 1,030-page bill, according to The Hill. The policy language has cleared the Environment and Public Works and Commerce Committees, but as usual, it’s the funding that remains in question, with plenty more question marks hounding the must-pass bill.
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The final three years of spending in the measure is contingent upon lawmakers coming up with a way to pay for it beyond the offsets that have been identified, but lawmakers included a provision that would expand the Federal Highway Administration’s Interstate System Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Pilot Program (ISRRPP) to make it easier for states to ask for permission to toll their roads.
