U.S. Senate

If the Banking Committee is going to make any progress on the transit section of the Senate transportation bill, it's going to have to happen before this weekend, when Congress leaves for the holiday recess and doesn't come back till late January. Indeed, on Friday, the very last day of the session, Banking is planning to vote on its part of the bill.

Congress has already delayed their holiday recess by a week, and members are hoping another delay won't be necessary. Among the yet-unfinished business: an extension of the payroll tax cut. House Speaker John Boehner plans to hold a vote today on his bill, which marries an extension of the payroll tax cut to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. While expected to sail through the House, such a partisan bill is unlikely to pass the Senate. Enter Senators Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Susan Collins (R-ME).

Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee have been working to find $12 billion to fund the transportation bill for the next two years. All their proposals have met with rejection from the committee's Republicans. Here's why: The Republicans have been holding out for a funding mix that would include their favorite Christmas presents -- oil drilling and attacks on conservation.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and his Finance Committee have been looking high and low for a $12 billion patch to fund the transportation reauthorization bill that passed the Senate EPW Committee a few weeks ago. According to Politico’s transportation reporters, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, has already rejected several of Baucus’s ideas.

Last week, the Ridesharing Institute sent out its first press release. Based in New Zealand (at least, that’s where the Executive Director is, though the group did recently incorporate in Delaware), the organization doesn’t yet have a website, though it does have a Facebook page and a wiki. As its first foray into U.S. politics, the Institute took on the Senate transportation bill, MAP-21. "Where is ridesharing in the bill?" the institute wondered.

This month’s bipartisan deal on the MAP-21 transportation bill in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hinged on a compromise to make major changes to the popular and successful Transportation Enhancements (TE) program, which primarily funds projects for biking and walking. The final deal eliminates dedicated funding for TE, instead making a smaller amount of money available for funding bike/ped -- and a host of other activities --under the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement program’s “Additional Activities” category (CMAQ-AA).

Though the House Republicans are stealing the show these days with their endeavor to tie infrastructure funding to oil drilling, let’s not forget there’s a serious, bipartisan transportation reauthorization bill out there that actually has a chance of passage: the Senate’s MAP-21. On its path toward a full Senate vote, that two-year bill is paused at its latest checkpoint: the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. The committee is now busy tackling the transit title of the “MAP-21” legislation, following unanimous approval of the "highway" portion two weeks ago by the EPW Committee. (Quick reminder: the funding in the highway title can be spent on many things that are not highways, like transit systems and bike lanes.)

Remember those radically different appropriations bills passed by the House and the Senate? And how I said they’d never come together, and they probably would never pass a 2012 budget anyway because all Congress ever does anymore is extend previous budgets because they can’t agree on anything?

“I want to congratulate you on your Committee’s approval of the ‘Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act,” begins House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica’s letter yesterday to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee.