John Mica's Transportation Bill to Nowhere

[FayeforCure]

Extremist partisanship on display by John Mica:


A highway bill should be a two-way street, not road to nowhere

By Rep. Jerry Costello (D-Ill.) - 02/17/12 10:33 AM ET


Let’s be honest - the House highway bill is headed toward a dead end. The formal debate will stretch out for a few weeks while the Republican majority works to get the votes to pass a bill that will never become law. While the policy is bad - Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called it the worst highway bill he has seen in 35 years â€" it is the “my way or the highway” process that has put it on a road to nowhere. As this exercise shows, sometimes breaking with established norms is a terrible mistake. 


I have served on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee during my entire tenure in Congress, and even as the House turned more partisan, the Committee prided itself on bi-partisanship. While we did not agree on everything, Republicans and Democrats worked together to advance the infrastructure needs of the country, routinely conferring on major legislation and working out as many issues in possible in advance. As the saying goes, “there are no Republican or Democratic roads.”


H.R. 7 is a departure from that philosophy, and it does not need to be. While there is a great deal of bi-partisan support for streamlining transportation programs and the approval process for projects, the bill text was presented to Democrats on the Committee less than a week before we marked it up, with no substantive input before then. The bill needlessly jeopardizes transit funding, severely cuts state formula funds and would result in significant job loss, and undermines safety - not exactly a blueprint for bi-partisanship. This approach stands in stark contrast to the Senate, where Senators Boxer and Inhofe have stressed the collaborative process used to produce their bill. 


Pretending that H.R. 7 is a real attempt to address the infrastructure needs of the nation, rather than the message piece that it is â€" further reduces public confidence in our ability to legislate.  There is still time to work together on the highway bill, but we need a new map to get to where we want to go.


Representative Costello (D-Ill.) has served in Congress for over 23 years, sitting on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Subcommittee on Aviation as the Ranking Member.


http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/211385-rep-jerry-costello-d-ill


Something Wicked This Way Comes: House Leadership's Three-Ring Transportation Circus

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Posted February 17, 2012 in Moving Beyond Oil
Tags:biking, bus, Camp, cars, commuter rail, congress, deficit, drilling, driving, gas, highways, infrastructure, legislation, metropolitan, Mica, public transportation, rail, repair, revenue, roads, suburbs, traffic, transportation, transportationdrilling
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Speaking with someone outside of the bubble of national policymaking yesterday, I remembered the surreal and alarming spectacle of the past two weeks in the House of Representatives.

At the beginning of last week those of us who work on transportation were sifting through hundreds of pages of proposed new law drafted by Republican Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica and his staff with little or no consultation with the other side of the aisle. It is, as I said at the time, a march of horribles, including but not limited to:

A long section slashing public oversight and environmental reviews of projects, undermining a 40-year-old law enacted with bipartisan support;

Elimination of dedicated bicycle and pedestrian funding programs enacted over the past 20 years, including Safe Routes to School (and who could be against that?);

Ramming a truck-sized loophole through the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program (CMAQ), a 20-year-old program that delivers air quality improvements via investments in such projects as bus rapid transit and high-occupancy vehicle lanes, making it just another highway program; and

Slashing funding for intercity rail.

But before this extreme, partisan scheme could be taken up, on Wednesday the Natural Resources Committee had to pass three drilling bills, which would for the first time in history be stapled to the package. This was a linkage touted by House Republican Leadership for months, with the claim that this would solve the problem of chronic revenue shortfalls faced by the trust fund which finances highways, transit and other transportation projects.

As I wrote when this was floated, it sounded like snake oil or Washington politics-as-usual. For the first time ever, the transportation program's future would hinge on a speculative source of revenue with a substantial lag-time before any revenue actually came in. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed that this is a fiscally reckless idea, as Taxpayers for Common Sense noted. In fact, one of the alleged revenue-generating bills was scored at virtually ZERO by CBO,as my colleague Bobby McEnaney noted. Nonetheless, last Wednesday all three bills were reported out of committee.

And in the second ring, we find the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee where debate got off to a bang last Thursday with the Chairman (Rep. Mica of FL) claiming to have a bipartisan bill (hard to tell if he was being deliberately or clumsily Orwellian) while the Ranking Member (Rep. Rahall of WV) protested about not being consulted about the bill and expressed shock about the partisan, extreme content. This was just the opening salvo in a 16-hour-long tense debate about the bill with party-line rejections of amendment-after-amendment that might have improved the final product. In the wee hours of Friday morning the bill was reported out with no Democratic support and with one Republican defector (Rep. Petri of Wisconsin).

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dlovaas/something_wicked_this_way_come.html