James Oberstar: “I am just delighted that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich), the author of this amendment, was not in the Eisenhower…”

“I am just delighted that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich), the author of this amendment, was not in the Eisenhower Cabinet or in the Bureau of Roads, as it was known in those days, because goodness knows we would never have had a Highway Trust Fund, we would have never had an interstate highway program; he would have just let the States go on and fumble as they had been doing. He would take us back to a time that none of us here could possibly imagine, a time when some States started roads, others did not, they built it up to a certain point and then it stopped. Bridges were started and then stopped. If we follow the gentleman's logic all the way through, we would have bridges that go halfway across a river because one State would want to build it and the other State would not or would run out of money, or we would have roads that go up to a State's border and the other State would say, 'Well, we don't think we want to build a road there.' I mean, he would have us in chaos, he would have us back in 14th century England when the rule was that the owner of a castle had to repair the road in front of their castle so that the carriages riding along would not be stuck in the potholes, and if they did, then they had to pull them out. He would set us back, not forward. This is a vote for the past, not a vote for the future.”