DALLAS - Senate leaders hope to pass a multiyear transportation bill in time to avoid a cutoff of federal transportation funding on Aug. 1 after altering an already revised measure to take out a revenue offset that Democratic senators found unacceptable.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed to remove provision that took $1.7 billion from the Treasury Department's Hardest Hit Fund, which was created in 2008 to help communities with high unemployment. The funding provided in the measure was reduced by the same amount.
Sponsors of the amended DRIVE Act, which was originally adopted by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in late June, had earlier removed a $2.3 billion offset from withholding Social Security benefits from fugitives from the compromise measure announced July 21 by McConnell and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
The latest version of the highway bill adds $2 billion to transit funding and increases transit's share of the $47 billion to be transferred to the Highway Trust Fund from general revenues to $11.3 billion from $10.7 billion the earlier version. The highway account's share of the transfer dropped to $35.8 billion from the original $36.5 billion allocation.
McConnell offered amendments to the highway bill on Friday to reauthorize the charter of the Export-Import Bank, which expired June 30, and a largely symbolic effort to defund the Affordable Care Act.
"Ex-Im shouldn't be the only vote we take on this bill, and under the compromise I just filed it won't be," McConnell said.
McConnell said he wants to send the Senate bill to the House no later than July 29.
A vote on the Ex-Im amendment is likely over the weekend. A vote on the entire bill could but probably will not occur as early as Sunday.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., agreed with McConnell's decision to include renewal of the export finance agency in the highway bill.
"I would hope the House would pass it as soon as they get it," Reid said.
House Speaker John Boehner said Friday he is dubious about the timetable for the Senate proposal.
"There's a lot of concern that is being raised by our committee chairman and others about the policy that's contained in the bill the Senate is considering," he said. "We don't know what that bill is going to look like until they pass it."
There is opposition in the House to the Ex-Im bank provision, Boehner said.
The two-month extension of the Highway Trust Fund passed by Congress in late May will expire July 31. Transportation Department said it would have to delay reimbursements to states for highway and bridge projects on Aug. 1. The House passed an $8 billion extension on July 14 that will extend the HTF until Dec. 18.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, an avowed opponent of the Ex-Im Bank who is seeking the Republican nomination for president in 2016, angrily denounced McConnell for offering the Ex-Im bank amendments to the transportation bill.
McConnell had earlier told him the Ex-Im revival would not be included in the highway bill, Cruz said on the Senate floor.
"Not only what he told every Republican senator but what he told the press over and over and over again was a simple lie," Cruz said. "The majority leader will say things he knows are false."
The finance agency is a cesspool of corporate welfare, Cruz said.
"Sadly today we have government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, and for the lobbyists," he said.
The three years of full funding in the bill will allow Congress to find overhaul the tax system to bring in the revenue needed to sustain surface transportation infrastructure, said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee.
"This means that whenever we can agree on a tax reform package, whether it's six months from now or later, it will still be possible and likely just as sensible to tie the two efforts together," Hatch said.
