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House to attempt 60-day highway bill
House Republican leaders will attempt Tuesday to extend funding for federal highway programs for 60 days.
The House had sought earlier this week to extend the current legislation that authorizes funding for road and transit projects for 90 days, through June 30. Democrats in the House refused to support suspending the House rules for a quick vote, however, denying GOP leaders the two-thirds support they would have needed to go forward.
A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Tuesday that the GOP would attempt again on Tuesday to pass a shorter extension, once more under the suspension of House rules.
"It will be up to Democrats whether they want to shut down the federal
highway system," Boehner spokesman Michael Steel wrote in an e-mail.
Republicans have countered that they are passing a short-term version of the transportation bill to give themselves more time to create a version of their proposal for a multi-year bill that can be passed by the House.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) had pushed for a five-year, $260 billion that he planned to pay for with legislation increasing domestic oil drilling, but he was unable to win support for the measure within his Republican caucus.
Democrats have been pressuring the lower chamber to accept a two-year, $109 billion version of the transportation bill that has been approved on a bipartisan vote by the Senate. Democrats tried Tuesday to add the Senate transportation version to an unrelated Federal Communications Commission bill, arguing that even with more time, Republicans will not be able to reach an agreement on a long-term transportation bill.
"There are 80 members of the Republican Party that believe there is no federal interest in transportation," Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who is a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said on the House floor Tuesday.
"'It should devolve to the states,'" DeFazio said in seeking to frame conservative opposition to the transportation bill. "Back to the good old days, when Kansas built the interstate system and Oklahoma didn't."
Some lawmakers are pushing for the House to use the stopgap extension to set up a conference committee with the Senate on its two-year bill.
"Discussions are ongoing between the Speaker and the Senate to try to figure out some kind of vehicle to get over to the Senate for the purposes of having a conference," a critic of the longer-term House GOP proposal, Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-Ohio), said. "That seems to be the best path forward."
The chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), said party leaders would decide whether to go to conference.
“We’re trying to get the longer term [bill]. We’ll see," he told reporters.
-This story was originally posted at 2:10 p.m. and it was most recently updated with new information at 3:45 p.m.
-Russell Berman contributed to this report.
