Legislation on overdue transportation plan could move forward this week.
We've got a big week coming up for transportation policy on Capitol Hill, as legislation authorizing a few years of funding for surface transportation projects – better known as the highway bill – might actually make some progress.
The Senate passed a version of such a bill back in July, and now corresponding legislation has advanced out of committee in the House! That's great news. Now it’s on to another committee to determine which of the hundreds of suggested amendments will be included when this bill finally arrives for a vote on the House floor.
How it will go will say a lot about the new order in the House. The highway bill is the first big business that new House Speaker Paul Ryan will have to tackle, and he became speaker on the promise he’d let more rank-and-file members in on the sausage-making of the legislative process – hence, your 270 amendments.
But while the vote isn’t certain, one thing is: a long-term, well-funded transportation plan is long overdue. We should be investing a ton into our public infrastructure, but in the meantime, a simple guarantee that funding for transportation projects will be there will do. As the academics note, this is a competitiveness issue: