House Passes 90-Day Highway Extension
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Chris Schneider/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — The House of Representatives voted 266-158 on Thursday to pass the GOP’s short-term 90-day extension of the highway bill, handing the trouble back to the Senate just days before current funding is set to run out.
Thirty-seven Democrats joined the Republican majority in approving the bill, while just 10 Republicans opposed the extension.
Without an extension, the existing highway legislation would run out of money on Saturday. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi blasted House Republicans for “kicking the can down the road” by passing a short-time fix instead of a two-year bill approved by a bipartisan majority in the Senate.
But Speaker Boehner maintained that a temporary extension is the “most responsible way forward” in order to buy Republicans more time to work out a long-term solution to mesh with the Senate’s two-year bill. Without a short-term bill, he warned, there could be a stoppage of construction.
After legislative business Thursday, the House will go on Easter recess for two weeks, returning to session April 16.
“After this 90 day extension today, when we get back, we will move quickly to move a highway bill with our energy initiatives and ship it over to the United States Senate,” Boehner, R-Ohio, pledged. “We are working on putting together the final touches on that bill and it’ll be ready when we get back.”
Boehner said that among the GOP’s final touches on a long-term proposal, Republicans hope to “responsibly increase energy production on federal lands and freeze new regulations on refineries that will have a harmful impact on our economy.” Republicans could also win votes by tying a long-term highway bill to the approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
The Senate passed a two-year, $109 billion transportation bill on March 14, with 74 votes in favor of the legislation – including 22 Republicans. But Boehner says he opposes some of the Senate’s payfors because they don’t meet the straight face test.
“You see some what I’ll call ‘gimmicks’ in terms of how it’s paid for,” the speaker said. “Secondly, they just run down the highway trust fund to virtually zero, which is going to – may get them through the next year and a half, but it’s going to cause a very big problem when this has to be addressed again.”
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