Bud Shuster: “I continue to reserve the balance of my time. Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close.…”

“I continue to reserve the balance of my time. Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close. Investing in infrastructure in America has always been extraordinarily bipartisan over the entire time I have been here. Recently, we have kind of gone off the tracks. It means we both have to cooperate on policy and on funding. For the life of me, why has the Republican Party drawn a line in the sand, saying we cannot have user fee-based investment in transportation which benefits people who drive cars, pickup trucks, buses, everybody who moves goods in America, we can't do that anymore, we have got to come up with some fanciful tax reform which may or may not happen? It is very sad. I proposed doing away with the retail gas tax, imposing a barrel tax, where some of the costs would be paid by ExxonMobil, Wall Street speculators, OPEC, Saudi Arabia, and, yes, they would probably pass a lot of it through at the pump, but that would be a fair way to move forward to make the massive investment we need to put hundreds of thousands of people back to work and get America moving again. I yield back the balance of my time.”