Advocates Urge Focus on Longer-Term Bill After Infrastructure Measure Fails in Senate

Transportation advocates said they were not surprised that Senate Republicans blocked President Obama’s $60 billion infrastructure proposal earlier this month, and they see it as an opportunity for Congress to focus on a long-term highway reauthorization bill.

“It was expected,” Darrin Roth, director of highway operations for American Trucking Associations, told Transport Topics.

“The offsets that were identified, which is an increase in taxes for people with high incomes, had been rejected by Republicans,” he said. “So as a result, that pretty much doomed the proposal.”

Democrats failed to get the package past a procedural vote Nov. 3, falling nine votes short of the 60 needed to clear a filibuster. The bill would have provided $50 billion in infrastructure spending, including $27 billion for highways, and a $10 billion infrastructure bank.

“The 51 votes is encouraging, considering all the other things that were on the bill, in particular the tax provisions that even some Democrats had objections to,” said Scott Thomasson, economic and domestic policy director at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Thomasson’s group is a staunch advocate for the national infrastructure bank, which would have provided loans and loan guarantees to government entities to bill a wide array of infrastructure (10-17, p. 7).

“I think the infrastructure bank portion of the bill was the least controversial,” he said.

The American Road & Transportation Builders Association looked at the Nov. 3 vote positively, because right after the vote, almost all Republicans voted for a failed measure that would have extended current highway funding for two years.

“Both Republicans and Democrats agree there is an urgency to improve the nation’s aging transportation network and that it should include a mechanism to ensure new investments are fully paid for,” Peter Ruane, president of ARTBA, said in a statement.

Roth agreed that Congress now can turn its attention to a highway bill to reauthorize expired transportation spending authorization.

“Hopefully, Congress can now focus on getting that passed,” he said. Obama’s proposal “was simply standing in the way of Congress’ focusing on a much more important piece of legislation.”

The bill would have added a tax of 0.7% on earnings above $1 million, a major sticking point for Republicans.

“They want to pay for this temporary spending bill with a permanent tax increase on job creators,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said before the vote.

Obama was disappointed in the Senate’s action.

“For the third time in recent weeks, every single Republican in the United States Senate

has chosen to obstruct a jobs bill that independent economists said would boost our economy and put Americans back to work,” Obama said in a statement, referring to the two pieces of his job-creation proposal that previously did not pass.

“It’s more clear than ever that Republicans in Washington are out of touch with Americans from all ends of the political spectrum,” the president said.

Obama originally had proposed the infrastructure measures in September as part of a bill to spur job creation with stimulus-style spending. After the entire bill failed in the Senate, Obama began to propose individual pieces in the Senate in October.

The Associated General Contractors of America also suggested that Congress now should look ahead.

“We were disappointed that the issue of infrastructure got politicized more than it needed to be, in the sense that the funding mechanism for it was a tax that everyone knew wouldn’t pass a vote in the Senate,” spokesman Brian Turmail told TT.

“What we find far more encouraging is that both the Senate and the House, having dispensed with that issue, are now earnestly discussing ways to finance and pass multiyear transportation investment bills,” Turmail said.

The fate of the national infrastructure bank is still up in the air. Legislation proposed in both the House and the Senate would create the bank.

“There’s still a lot of optimism that there will be other opportunities and other legislative moments to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bank proposal,” Thomasson said.

But Roth predicted that the bank issue is dead for the time being.

“It’s not in the Senate [reauthorization] bill, and it hasn’t received a great reception in the House, so we believe it won’t be in the House [reauthorization] bill,” Roth said. “At least for now, the national infrastructure bank appears to be off the table.”