{"id":4226,"date":"2005-05-18T09:49:03","date_gmt":"2005-05-18T13:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4226.html"},"modified":"2005-05-18T09:49:03","modified_gmt":"2005-05-18T13:49:03","slug":"never-get-between-a-lawmaker-and-a-highway-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/never-get-between-a-lawmaker-and-a-highway-bill\/","title":{"rendered":"Never get between a lawmaker and a highway bill"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ordinarily, a congressional transportation bill is about as politically provocative as a telephone book. Hardly the stuff of interesting blog posts. But the $295 billion highway bill that passed the Senate<\/a> yesterday is more interesting than most.<\/p>\n

The Senate is uniting on a $295 billion highway bill aimed at building bigger, better roads while creating tens of thousands of jobs, but the administration says it’s too expensive for a country at war and in debt. <\/p>\n

Courting what would be the first veto of the Bush presidency, the Senate was expected on Tuesday to overwhelmingly back a six-year package that, in addition to funding highway and bridge projects, would provide more than $50 billion for public transit, fund recreational road programs and promote highway safety.<\/p>\n

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said that he was one of the most conservative members of Congress but was at odds with the administration because “there are two areas where we need to spend money. One is national defense and the other is infrastructure.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bush told lawmakers, in no uncertain terms, that this bill could cost no more than $284 billion. Dems and Republicans in the Senate uncharacteristically ignored the White House’s request and passed a more generous spending bill — proving once again that one should never get between a member of Congress and a highway bill.<\/p>\n

The fun part will be to see what Bush is prepared to do about it.
\n
\nThe White House has threatened to veto the highway bill, which would be the first veto of Bush’s presidency. So, Bush gives Congress a ceiling, Congress breaks the ceiling, but Bush wins by using his veto pen, right? Maybe not. The Senate passed the highway bill 89 to 11<\/a>. The House passed it 417 to 9<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In other words, if Congress wants to override Bush’s veto — and make the president look really<\/i> bad in the process — it has more than enough votes to do it.<\/p>\n

So what does the president do? If Bush signs the bill after threatening to veto it, he’ll look weak. If Bush vetoes the bill and Congress overrides him, he’ll look even weaker.<\/p>\n

I don’t doubt that congressional Republicans would want to save the White House the embarrassment, but I also don’t doubt that they know that highway projects are political gold back home. And unlike Bush, these guys have to worry about re-election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ordinarily, a congressional transportation bill is about as politically provocative as a telephone book. Hardly the stuff of interesting blog posts. But the $295 billion highway bill that passed the Senate yesterday is more interesting than most. The Senate is uniting on a $295 billion highway bill aimed at building bigger, better roads while creating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}