Investing in A New Vision for the Environment and Surface Transportation in America Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. PALMER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for yielding.

Because the committee has long been known for bipartisan cooperation, when I first came on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, I was actually optimistic that we could work together to get a good bill to the full House. How naive of me to think that my Democrat colleagues would put aside their radical agenda to work with Republican Members to pass a sensible and affordable surface transportation bill.

I can hardly overstate my disappointment that, from the very beginning, we were completely shut out of the process. I had hoped that the partisan nature of this surface transportation reauthorization would end after the bill was marked up in committee. Clearly, that was wishful thinking.

While the entire transportation reauthorization process has been abused, it has served at least one good purpose in that it has put on full display the extreme ideas of my Democrat colleagues and just how destructive to the committee process they have become.

Apparently, it wasn't enough to ram through a bill drafted without any input from Republican Members, which increased spending by 62 percent while our Nation is drowning in debt by adding a trillion dollars in miscellaneous spending to the proposal that already wasn't serious to begin with.

My guess is that this is another Democrat bill that would have to be passed to find out exactly what is in it and what it will really cost American households.

The real tragedy in all of this is that it represents a missed opportunity to work in a bipartisan fashion to solve the problems that we all recognize exist. Instead of spending time working to minimize delays, streamline the environmental permitting process, and fund projects with a clear Federal nexus, my Democrat colleagues have brought to the floor a wish list of Green New Deal proposals.

Some of my colleagues who have been on this committee much longer than me tell me that they have never opposed a highway bill. It is a shame that they will no longer be able to say that solely because of the majority's failure to cooperate on this bill in a bipartisan fashion.

We were eager to engage in a legitimate committee process to consider a responsible proposal to reauthorize our surface transportation programs. Unfortunately, as I said before, this has been a fraud from the start.

I guess I could say at least they didn't promise: If you like your car, you can keep driving it.

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