Political Quotes

“Mr. President, right now probably the most significant thing we will be facing as soon as we get through with the education bill that Senator Lamar Alexander has done such a great job on is the transportation reauthorization bill. I found out the House just passed a few minutes ago a 5-month extension to the highway reauthorization bill. I would suggest to the people who may think there is some type of adversarial relationship between our bill in the Senate and the House bill that there isn't. We are working together and we both want to accomplish a long-term bill, and I anticipate that we will actually have passed in the next few days a long-term--maybe a 6-year--highway reauthorization bill, at which time we will go to conference with the House and it will be business as usual. I want to make sure, in case there is a fire looming out there, that we put it out early. Passing the long-term transportation bill has been my top priority since I returned as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Ironically, the ranking member of that committee, Senator Boxer of California, feels just as strongly that it is her top priority also. So I consider this to be the second most significant bill of the year, the first one being of course the Defense reauthorization, which we have already addressed here. But we felt strongly enough about this being a top priority that we had our first full committee hearing on the need to reauthorize what at that time was MAP-21.…”