Political Quotes

“I would like to address a slightly different topic, which is the continuing conference on the highway bill. We passed a very good highway bill in the Senate. We passed it on time for the March 31 deadline when the highway trust fund was going to expire. We passed it in bipartisan fashion, with 75 Senators supporting it. We passed it after it came unanimously out of the Environment and Public Works Committee with the support of the chairman, Senator Boxer, and the ranking member, Senator Inhofe. We passed it after a very open and transparent floor process in which around 40 amendments were agreed to either by vote or agreement, and it has the support of everybody from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to labor, from the pavers to the environmentalists. So it is a good piece of legislation. It was done right. The problem is that it is running up against a time deadline. As my director of transportation tells me, if we delay this too long, he has to start dropping projects off of this summer's highway work period because the time is slipping away as we dawdle here in Congress on this bill. It is not just the Rhode Island Department of Transportation saying this. Standard & Poor's Global Credit Portal has a report, ``Increasingly Unpredictable Federal Funding Could Stall U.S.…”