James Oberstar: “Mr. Speaker and colleagues, here we are once again for at least the fifth time in 3 years to consider technical…”

“Mr. Speaker and colleagues, here we are once again for at least the fifth time in 3 years to consider technical corrections to the SAFETEA-LU legislation. In the 109th Congress, the gentleman from Alaska, then Chair of the full committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and I worked to bring this technical corrections bill to the House floor, passed it successfully. We dealt with hundreds and hundreds of minor adjustments, changes that normally happen in the course of passing a major bill of this nature. If I recall rightly, in ISTEA in 1991, there were 600 or 700 such technical corrections in the TEA-21 bill. In 1998 there were something like 1,200 technical corrections that had to be made. And we had a somewhat smaller number for SAFETEA-LU. We passed it three times in that Congress, and three times we could not get the other body, as we affectionately call them, to come to agreement and move the bill. Finally, the Senate passed the bill by an overwhelming margin of 88-2.”