Stop the Student Loan Interest Rate Hike Act of 2012--Motion to Proceed--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, 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. Transportation Infrastructure Projects.''

It says within the report:

As the construction season begins in the northern half of the country, this continuing uncertainty in funding could force states to delay projects rather than risk funding changes or political gridlock come July.

So we need to get this done, and I have heard at this point that the House Republican conferees intend to hold the conference on this bill through late June, and if we do that, that will cost jobs in America, that will cost jobs in Rhode Island, that will cost jobs around the country because our transportation directors are going to have to take work scheduled for the summer and postpone it, and that is a very unfortunate turn of events. It has nothing to do with the merits.

Unfortunately, the House was not able to pass a highway bill of any kind, which is unfortunate because it is not the most complicated task. It is something we have been doing for decades around here. They couldn't get that done, and so what they have done now is gone to conference on the Senate bill without a bill of their own, and this appears to be causing delay. So I am here to urge that we all encourage the House Members of the highway conference committee to expedite their work as much as they can. Apparently there is a 2-week period that the House is taking off, and if it is delayed by 2 weeks so that Members can go home, I don't think that is a profitable use of our time.

There is a great deal of loose talk around here about jobs. We have even had bills that didn't relate to jobs called jobs bills because of gimmickry in the title. But this is a real jobs bill. This is 3.9 million jobs for the country, and it is 9,000 jobs for Rhode Island, as calculated in years of work--job years. We are just wasting that if we don't get this done on time.

So if people really want to do something about jobs, they can get the highway bill moved along rapidly so that the work can be done in this summer work session.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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