Departments of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008

Floor Speech

DEPARTMENTS OF TRANSPORTATION, HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, on August 2, 2007, by a vote of 83 to 14, the Senate approved S. 1, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, clearing that measure for the President. When that is signed by the President, this ethics reform legislation will significantly improve the transparency and accountability of the legislative process.

While the President hasn't yet signed that legislation, I wish to assure Senators that we intend to abide by the requirements of that legislation during the consideration of this bill. The legislation requires that the chairman of the committee of jurisdiction certify that certain information related to congressionally directed spending be identified and that the required information be available on a publicly accessible congressional Web site in a searchable format at least 48 hours before a vote on the pending bill. The information required includes identification of the congressionally directed spending and the name of the Senator who requested such spending. This information is contained in the committee report numbered 110-131, dated July 16, 2007, and has been available on the Internet now for 8 weeks.

In addition, pursuant to standards established by Chairman Byrd and Senator Cochran for consideration of the fiscal year 2008 bills, letters from each Member with the congressionally directed spending item in this bill or accompanying report are available on the Internet certifying that neither the Senator nor his or her spouse has a pecuniary interest in such spending item.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have a certification by the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations printed in the Record at this point.

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Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I have listened to the Senator from Oklahoma on the amendment he has offered, and I want to make a few comments.

I remind all of our colleagues that at noon we are going to go to a moment of silence. Today is the 9/11 anniversary, and it is a time we all want to pause for a minute to reflect on what has happened over the last 6 years. Hopefully, I will be able to make a few remarks, and we will see if the Senator from Oklahoma has any remaining time, and then I can talk to my colleague and we can set a time for this vote and then get to many of the other issues that are pending now on this bill.

I want to remind all my colleagues that we are trying to work to finish this bill. Hopefully, we will get a path cleared for late tonight or to finish tomorrow morning. I remind everyone that we are going to be finishing this bill because of the Jewish holidays this weekend. We are trying to work through this in a very tight timeframe. We have a number of pending amendments we want to work through.

But let me respond to the Senator from Oklahoma. He brings before the Senate today his argument on funding bridges within our Transportation bill, and yesterday the Senate spoke out very strongly and acted very strongly to address the needs of our deficient bridges across the Nation. I spoke out on the floor yesterday about the number of bridges that were deficient across our country, the imperative that we have in moving forward to make sure that they are taken care of, and on a very strong bipartisan vote we approved yesterday a $1 billion increase in Federal funding for bridges. That was, I remind everyone, a historic 25-percent increase in Federal bridge funding.

That amendment won't allow us, obviously, to fix every deficient bridge, but it is a historic increase, and it does set the priority of this bill in moving forward to address this very critical need that I share the concern of the Senator from Oklahoma about. We cannot, however, let all our other transportation and all of our other housing priorities be ignored to address the bridge problem.

Yes, we are all very focused on what happened because of Minnesota. But having worked on this bill for a number of years, and worked with my colleague from Missouri, we have had hearings on safety and infrastructure in this country that need to be addressed. The FAA needs to be addressed, we need to deal with our Nation's highways, and there are a number of critical housing projects. We have to balance all of those priorities, and I think we have done a very good job in this bill of doing that, and then adding $1 billion yesterday to address the bridge problem.

The long-term solution to our need to address our underinvestment in infrastructure is going to have to come about within the Transportation authorization bill that will be debated sometime in the future. My colleague, Senator Bond, has been a leader on that committee, and we need to do a thorough look at the revenues available in the trust funds. We have talked about that on this floor through our bill. We know that needs to be addressed. We have talked to the Finance Committee. It does need to be addressed and will be addressed with this Congress, and in the coming years.

But I want to remind my colleagues that the vast majority of our transportation earmarks that are in this bill require a match, and not just a small match but an overmatch by local communities that have set the priorities for these projects and brought them to the attention of Members who have then brought them to us and to our committee.

As we move to a vote on the amendment that has been offered by the Senator from Oklahoma, I remind everyone that if it passes, it would have the impact of bringing many of our multibillion-dollar projects to a complete halt. His amendment would not just terminate highway projects, it would also stop major transit projects that many Senators have come to our committee and talked about. They are currently under construction, and we are funding them in the Federal Transit Administration. These are projects that are working their way through the pipeline. If we were to wipe them out with this amendment, construction contracts across the country for these transit projects would be halted and cause a tremendous amount of difficulties and probably challenges within those contracts as well.

Those contracts include the Jacksonville Rapid Transit System in Florida, the Regional Rail Project in Pennsylvania, the South County Commuter Rail, Wickford Junction Station in Rhode Island, transit projects in Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Virginia, another one in Virginia, Washington, Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois.

Madam President, I refer all of my colleagues to the Transportation bill, all of these projects that are now under construction that have full funding grant agreements would be brought to a halt if this amendment were to pass.

So besides all the other arguments, I encourage Members to understand what the impacts of this amendment are should it pass on the Senate floor today.

Now, let me, before we go to a moment of silence in just a minute, Madam President, remind my colleagues that the IG report that the Senator from Oklahoma referred to today does refer to past practices of this Congress. We came into session in January of this year understanding the need to take a look at our processes within the appropriations. We understood the impact from past practices that were under scrutiny, and we addressed them very clearly.

This Congress has now sent a very comprehensive ethics reform law to the President, and we are awaiting his signature. That law includes some new procedures that require a great deal of clarity and transparency that have not been required ever before in Congress. But even before we sent that law to the White House, the Appropriations Committee, under the direction of our chairman, Senator Byrd, and Ranking Member Cochran, said we are not going to wait for a law to be enacted. We imposed new rules that require new procedures under the ethics reform bill. And this bill, this Transportation bill, in working through our process, has directly followed those new rules and the new rules of the ethics bill that have been sent to the President.

Every Senator who asked for an earmark was required to certify that there was no pecuniary interest in their earmark request, and each and every one of those certifications is now available for any Senator to look at on the Web for review. Every earmark is identified with the Senator who requested it in the Congressional Record. You can look on the Web site to see who is there. So we are complying with what this Senate has said we need to do.

I would also remind all of us that in addition to those reforms, Senator Bond and I worked to develop a new procedure within the Transportation Housing Subcommittee, and under the procedures we have established, each and every earmark has to be fully consistent with the mission of the Department of Transportation or the Department of Housing and Urban Development. So we recognized that past practices have brought us to a point today where we have to fully look at each and every one of these earmarks. We make sure they are consistent with the funding requirements of that bill, and they are seeing the light of day, as we will see today as we face a number of amendments about them.

I want to make one final point before we move to this important moment of silence that is going to occur, and that is, the Senator from Oklahoma is essentially arguing that bureaucrats in Washington, DC, make every decision about funding across the Nation.

Madam President, I know I go home every weekend and I talk to community leaders, I talk to mayors, I talk to members of numerous community projects, and I listen to what their needs are. There is no bureaucrat in any department of this United States Government in Washington, DC, who takes the time that most of us do to go home and really understand what the needs of our communities are and to come back here and fight for them. That is what we do. That is our job, and we are responsible for that. I take a back seat to no one in working hard to represent the interests of my State.

Finally, Madam President, one other point. The Senator from Oklahoma said he only wants to see authorized funding being done. I would remind all my colleagues, if we move to that, the State Department hasn't been authorized for years, the FAA authorization will run out this year, the Older Americans Act, the No Child Left Behind Act--all extremely important business we need to accomplish. But if we move to a point that says no money except authorized, a number of critical programs in this country will be subject to cutback. I don't think that is what any of us intend to do.

Madam President, we are moving rapidly to a very important moment in the Senate, and I notice many of my colleagues are coming to the floor right now. I ask that all of us listen to our majority leader at this point, and I yield the floor.

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