Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spent much of the weekend negotiating with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to craft a multi-year transportation bill to replace the temporary spending bill that expires in 10 days. The bill is expected to be released Tuesday, but the obstacles from McConnell's fellow Republicans could
derail his plans.
McConnell is pursuing a multi-year bill shorter than the six-year extension favored by Senate Democrats and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Doing so could head off an intraparty fight over how to use revenues from tax reform. […]
McConnell shared a list of possible offsets for the highway bill with the Senate Republican Conference at a meeting last week in a bid to develop consensus before unveiling the plan publicly.
"The thing to avoid is to raise taxes to pay for the overspending driven by Davis-Bacon," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, referring to the federal law that requires contractors on federal highway projects be paid the prevailing local wage rate.
Defacto-leader Norquist's fiat isn't the only problem for McConnell. He and Boxer need to come up with funding mechanisms that Democrats will support. The
proposal he floated last week would cut federal retiree pensions and Social Security disability payments. Senate Democrats
"stridently oppose" the pension proposal.
McConnell's bigger problem, though, comes from inside his conference where both Rand Paul and Ted Cruz plan on using the bill for their own grandstanding purposes. Paul has threatened to put an amendment to defund Planned Parenthood into the first bill that moves, and this is the bill moving this week. Ted Cruz has two hobby horses that he plans to flog this week, Obamacare subsidies to Congress members and their staff and making sure that the Export-Import Bank is not resurrected. Another presidential contender in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, is fighting for the Ex-Im measure.
Meanwhile, every other Republican senator who has to run for re-election in 2016 in their home state needs to have transportation funding pass, and it needs to pass within the next 10 days or construction projects across the nation shut down. That would not be a good start to their campaigns.
9:34 AM PT: Sens. McConnell and Boxer just spoke on the floor announcing an agreement—"in principle" Boxer emphasized—for a six-year bill with three years of guaranteed funding. Minority Leader Reid cautioned against celebrating until everyone gets to read the agreement. Both party caucuses are meeting now, separately in their weekly lunches where they'll be briefed on the details. Until after that, those details likely won't be public. There will be a cloture vote on a motion to proceed to debate at 4:00 ET today.