Rob Portman: “I appreciate my colleague from Delaware. He is the chair of the committee that produced a lot of the work that went into…”

“I appreciate my colleague from Delaware. He is the chair of the committee that produced a lot of the work that went into this package. Roads, bridges, the highway bill, and the surface transportation bill comes through his committee. He and Senator Capito from West Virginia worked together, on a bipartisan basis. And my recollection is the underlying bill that we pick up in this broader bill that has to do with roads and bridges and so on passed with a vote of 22 to nothing out of this committee, and that is because they did good work in finding out where there was common ground. And, frankly, you know, the American people deserve to have good roads and bridges and infrastructure to drive on and travel on. So it is a big part of this bill, and I thank him for his work on that. We have now voted twice to proceed to this very important legislation, to finally, after a lot of years of talking about it, making major improvements to our Nation's roads and bridges and railroads and ports and waterways and water infrastructure, electrical grids, our broadband networks, and more. It is overdue. And I am delighted to say that twice now we have voted to proceed to final passage. One was a vote of 66 to 28, and the other was a vote of 67 to 27. And, frankly, there were a couple of people on our side of the aisle who were not able to come vote, one of whom has COVID and the other, in both cases, somebody had travel difficulties.…”