[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 178 (Friday, November 16, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14597-S14599]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  UNANIMOUS-CONSENT REQUEST--H.R. 3074

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate 
proceed to the consideration of the conference report to accompany H.R. 
3074, the Transportation-HUD Appropriations Act; that there be 20 
minutes of debate with respect to the conference report; with the time 
equally divided and controlled between Senators Murray and Bond or 
their designees; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate 
proceed to vote on adoption of the conference report, without further 
intervening action or debate.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection?

[[Page S14598]]

  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, there is objection on behalf of members of 
the 
Republican side. As you know, the Republican leader objected to the 
same request yesterday. There is objection.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Objection is heard.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, we are about to begin one of the busiest 
travel seasons of the year--the week of our Thanksgiving holiday. The 
millions of Americans who will take to our Nation's roads, rails, and 
airways probably won't have the country's transportation budget on 
their minds. But we had them in mind as we put together this bipartisan 
Transportation-Housing appropriations bill and negotiated the 
conference agreement before us today. Unfortunately, the Senate 
Republican leadership has now formally blocked our ability to have a 
vote on this conference agreement and move it to the White House. And 
that is shameful.
  Our conference report invests in rebuilding our infrastructure and 
modernizing our safety systems. It spends the money needed to 
adequately staff our air traffic control towers and hire the safety 
inspectors for aircraft, pipelines, and railroads that are needed to 
protect us. It rejects misguided budget cuts proposed by the White 
House to slash the number of safety inspectors, underfund our highway 
needs, and throw Amtrak into bankruptcy.
  This bill also keeps faith with another American Thanksgiving 
tradition--giving back to those who are less fortunate. It rejects the 
President's proposals to slash housing funds for the elderly and the 
disabled and provides necessary increases to shelter the homeless and 
keep federally subsidized tenants in their homes.
  Finally, this holiday, millions of families will worry that they 
won't be able to keep their homes for another year. Millions are facing 
foreclosure on their homes in the coming months as their mortgage 
payments rise to unaffordable levels. This agreement helps address that 
crisis by targeting a quarter of a billion dollars to ensure these 
families get counseling that will allow them to stay in their homes. We 
are working to stop the rising number of foreclosures and increasing 
despair among the millions of citizens who pursued the American dream 
of homeownership.
  Throughout this process, I have worked closely with a very able 
partner, my ranking member, Senator Bond of Missouri. We held numerous 
hearings together. We negotiated every line of a very complicated 
spending bill together, and we negotiated the details of a conference 
report with the House together. Senator Bond and I didn't agree on 
every issue or every funding level, but we continued to make 
compromises so that we could keep the team together, press forward with 
our joint responsibilities.
  We were able to put together an appropriations bill that was reported 
by our committee without one dissenting vote. That bill passed the 
Senate with 88 votes. We then negotiated a conference agreement that 
earned the signature of every single conferee, on both sides of the 
aisle, on both sides of Capitol. I am so proud of how well we were able 
to work together to get this important bill done. This is truly a 
bipartisan bill.
  Sadly, President Bush threatened to veto this agreement--despite the 
years of neglect it seeks to reverse--and even though it has strong 
bipartisan support. The President says he opposes this bill because it 
spends about $3 billion more than the levels he requested for these 
programs back in February. I think it is unconscionable that he wants 
to spend $196 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--in this year 
alone. Yet he refuses to invest just $3 billion on some of the basic 
needs of every American--transportation and housing.
  What is even worse is that instead of standing up for programs they 
believe in--that they supported already--the Republican leadership here 
in the Senate has decided to stand in the way in order to protect 
President Bush from having to veto these important projects. The Senate 
Republican leadership put their loyalty to this failed Presidency above 
all the good this bill can do--and above the fact that 88 Members of 
the Senate supported it.
  Clearly, when the Senate Republican leadership calls for 
bipartisanship--as they have several times since they became the 
minority--they don't necessarily mean it. When we have a truly 
bipartisan agreement, they might still kill it just to score a 
political point. And that is a tragedy for the Senate and for 
Americans.
  So I think it is important to point out why this bill spends more 
than the President's request. It is because all the conferees--
Democrats and Republicans alike refused to let our bridges and highways 
crumble. They refused to go into the busiest travel week of the year by 
slashing funding for airports and railways. They refused to let our 
families lose their homes without an opportunity to work with their 
lender and professional counselors to keep it. And they refused to let 
our returning heroes lie homeless on the street in need of shelter and 
mental health services.
  Now let me share some examples of why this bill should move forward.
  We have all heard the stories this year about record flight delays 
that have disrupted people's travel plans across the country. Customer 
service complaints are at an alltime high. Our airports and runways are 
now more congested than they have ever been. And that is on a normal 
nonholiday week--some 27 million Americans will take to the 
airways this Thanksgiving.

  We also face a huge challenge as we work to replace the thousands of 
air traffic controllers and safety inspectors who are scheduled to 
retire over the next several years. The void they will leave threatens 
the safety and reliability of our airlines. Many of our controllers are 
still using equipment that is two decades old or older. But if the 
President had his way, we would cut funding to modernize our air 
traffic control system by more than $50 million.
  Well, not one Democratic or Republican conferee on our bill stood up 
for the President's dramatic cuts in airport investment. And no one 
agreed that the cutting our investment in modernized equipment was a 
good idea.
  The President just doesn't get it. Just yesterday, he voiced concern 
about flight delays even as he continued to threaten to veto this bill. 
Only someone who flies on Air Force One could make those two statements 
at the same time. Travelers will have President Bush and the Senate 
Republican leadership to thank as they wait at the gate and on the 
runway, this holiday weekend.
  Mr. President, the next is train travel. This coming Wednesday--the 
day before Thanksgiving--more than 125,000 Americans will use the 
Amtrak system in just 1 day. Our overcrowded highways and runways 
aren't able to absorb those travelers. We have to keep up our 
investments in options like Amtrak, which will cut down on highway 
congestion and air pollution caused by cars stalled in traffic. Yet the 
President proposed to decimate Amtrak's funding, which would have 
thrown the railroad into certain bankruptcy.
  Well, all the conferees--House and Senate--Democrats and 
Republicans--refused to slash funding for Amtrak by nearly 40 percent--
or almost $500 million. Not one wanted to lose our Nation's passenger 
rail service to the President's misguided budget priorities.
  Thirdly, we agreed to spend more than the President requested because 
the conferees recognized that the millions of holiday travelers who 
take to the highways next week will cross over 600,000 bridges that the 
Federal Highway Administration has rated as ``Deficient.'' Mr. 
President, 80,000 of those bridges have been deemed to be functionally 
obsolete, meaning they don't meet today's design standards for safety, 
and they are handling traffic far beyond what they are designed for. 
These are not just remote bridges in sparse parts of the country, 
either--6,000 of those deficient bridges are on the National Highway 
System--the core network of highways that connect our major cities and 
towns.
  We still have a tragic reminder of the cost of neglecting our 
highways and bridges. In the city of Minneapolis, tens of thousands of 
Thanksgiving travelers will be required to take alternative routes due 
to the collapse of Interstate 35W bridge.
  This conference report includes $195 million to help complete the 
reconstruction of the I-35W bridge. It also includes additional 
spending authority of $1 billion dollars from the Highway

[[Page S14599]]

Trust Fund to allow all 50 States to beef up bridge inspections and 
rebuild or renovate their most deficient bridges. That additional 
spending authority came about as a result of my amendment, which passed 
on the floor back in early September. I want to thank the many 
Republican Senators who supported me on that vote.
  Now the President's budget was formulated and delivered to Congress 
before the Minneapolis tragedy. But I just think it is wrong that the 
President hasn't altered his budget priorities one penny in the wake of 
that reality.
  Both sides of the aisle in Congress have heard the wake-up call on 
the need to address our most critical, deteriorating infrastructure. 
Yet the President would rather spend $196 billion on the war than help 
our communities ensure their safety.
  Our conference agreement also helps protect homeowners who are 
struggling to keep a roof over their heads. It spends more than the 
President's request because the conferees--Democrats and Republicans 
alike--didn't hide from the subprime mortgage crisis that is 
threatening to destroy many middle-income communities across the 
Nation.
  In the next two quarters, more than 2 million homeowners throughout 
the Nation will see their mortgage payments rise. Many of them will 
struggle or fail to meet these new, higher payments. We are now seeing 
communities where every other home--or every third home--is being 
abandoned by homeowners who can't meet their payments. Whole 
communities are having their economic underpinnings ripped from beneath 
them. Many of these near-ghost towns have been concentrated in the 
industrial Midwest. But Senators must know--if something isn't done to 
address this crisis soon, we will find these communities all across the 
country.
  Our conference agreement includes a special infusion of $200 million 
to boost housing counseling efforts to help keep struggling mortgage-
holders in their homes. It is the same level that was included in the 
Senate version of the bill--a 500-percent increase over the current 
level. And rather than send this additional funding into the HUD 
bureaucracy, we have sent it out for competitive grants through the 
Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation--a federally chartered 
corporation that specializes in this area.
  I am especially proud that this agreement helps protect our veterans, 
who-- tragically--now make up a quarter of the homeless population.
  Veterans Day just passed. In the speech I delivered in my home State, 
I said we ought to be asking what we can do--as a community, a state, 
and a nation--for our veterans. The conferees on our Transportation-
Housing bill--Democrats and Republicans alike--refused to turn their 
back on the realities facing our returning heroes from Iraq and 
Afghanistan and all past conflicts. So our bill took one step in the 
right direction for our veterans. It includes $75 million for 
additional housing vouchers, which provide housing assistance through 
HUD, as well as supportive services through the VA to help get our 
heroes back on their feet.
  This isn't the first year the President has tried to underfund our 
Nation's housing and transportation system. The cuts this Congress 
refused to adopt this year are the very same reckless cuts proposed by 
the Bush administration in 2007, in 2006, in 2005, and every other 
year. The President has been proposing to slash funding for the CDBG 
Program, for elderly and disabled housing, for Amtrak, and for 
airports--year, after year, after year. This year was no different--and 
Congress responded the same way. The only difference between this year 
and prior years is that this year President Bush is threatening to veto 
the bill. And the Senate Republican leadership is determined to protect 
him from having to make that hard decision.
  But the American people don't care about party politics. They care 
about whether their bridges are safe enough to travel on. They care 
about whether they will have to sit for hours in the airport because 
their flights were delayed. They care--when they are sitting on a train 
platform--about whether the train is actually going to arrive. And they 
care about our homeless veterans and the need to keep struggling 
mortgage-holders in their homes.
  Our conference committee addressed those realities head-on and came 
up with a bipartisan solution. I only wish the Senate Republican 
leadership had these concerns of the American people on their minds 
rather than their need to protect a misguided President who is so out 
of touch with the American people.
  We learned today where bipartisanship begins and ends for the Senate 
Republican leadership. It begins with empty, insincere rhetoric on the 
Senate floor. And it ends when it comes to the need to protect 
President Bush. When the American people wonder why important 
legislation is not passing out of the Senate, they should look at this 
example, one where the Senate Republican leadership is blocking 
progress on a bill that bears the signature of every Republican who 
worked on it--one where the needs of the American people are thrown out 
the window in favor of the need to protect a failed President.

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