On the recordJune 29, 2012
I just want to remind everyone again, as I said in my opening remarks, this bill has no earmarks. Yes, we know how they did it in the past, with 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 earmarks, and certainly there would be a lot of support among individual Members if that were the case. This bill has no earmarks. It's good policy. {time} 0950 The Federal Government says: We know all. We know everything that's needed in every single community, and we can stamp out one of our famed cookie-cutter approaches to funding transportation, as we used to do, so that every single dollar has a little teeny category and every State is brought into spending within those little teeny categories. Yes, we could have done that, but that's the old way of doing it. We did it a different way. We actually had a conference, no earmarks, and we gave States flexibility. We sent to the States the opportunity to decide. Did we take out any of those things that were mentioned? Absolutely not. They're all options. So every single dollar we send to the State, the State has an opportunity to say, Maybe we don't want to do a sound barrier, whatever it is that's there. No, we can take the flexibility that's given to us, we can use it. We can use it to our benefit far better to build transportation from the ground up rather than to build it from the top down, Washington, D.C. cookie-cutter style. I yield 2 minutes to the gentlelady from Illinois (Mrs. Biggert).
