House Passes 90-Day Highway Extension; Pelosi Blasts Republicans

By John Parkinson
@jparkABC

Mar 29, 2012 2:18pm

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The House of Representatives voted 266-158 today to easily pass the GOP’s short-term 90-day extension of the highway bill, handing the political hot potato 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.
“The American people have a right to know why – why the Republicans in the Senate, the Democrats in the Senate, the President of the United States, the House Democrats, all support this bipartisan bill, why the Republicans in the House are odd-man-out,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said on the House floor just before the vote. “This initiative, this ‘kick the can down the road,’ this ‘my or no highway bill’ attitude is costing jobs.”
But Speaker John 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 today, 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.
As the GOP searches for a path forward, Pelosi chastised House Republicans for struggling to find the votes to pass their own long-term bill.
“The Republicans cannot even bring their own transportation bill to the floor and pass it,” Pelosi said. “Their own transportation bill is not a good bill, but at least it would take us to conference.  They can’t vote for their own bill. I don’t know how that happens, but they have a bill that they can’t support.”
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.”