Congress
Johnson eyes highway bill action in lame duck
Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that the full, five-year surface transportation reauthorization bill will likely be a lame duck issue — and that he would push to wrap it up before the 119th Congress concludes.
When asked by Blue Light News when the House will hold a floor vote on the legislation, Johnson said, “We’re working on that” and pivoted to ding the Senate, saying the upper chamber “hasn’t made any movement towards it at all.”
But he added that the House is trying to work with the Senate and “hopefully it’s an exercise we get done in a lame duck.”
“I think that’s what everybody expects at this point, but we’ll have to see,” Johnson said.
“It is a big priority for us, there’s some great policy in there, and we’re gonna work aggressively to get it done” this year, he added.
The legislation, also known as the highway bill, authorizes funding for roads, bridges and transit. Both the House Transportation and Energy and Commerce committees in May approved their portions of the legislation. The current bill, the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, lapses Sept. 30.
The House is poised to clear a Senate-passed extension of the existing surface authorities later Tuesday, kicking the deadline from the end of September to Dec. 11. That gives Capitol Hill more time to attempt to pass a full reauthorization.
But lawmakers face numerous obstacles. The House Ways and Means Committee’s plans remain unclear. That panel has jurisdiction over the federal gas tax, which flows into the ailing Highway Trust Fund. The Senate, meanwhile, has yet to release text.
Passing the surface bill is a big priority for retiring House Transportation Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.).
Asked Tuesday about the timing of a full House vote, Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told Blue Light News that it’s dependent on what the tax-writing committee ends up doing.
“It’s still a negotiation and before the Ways and Means Committee,” he said. “There’s one final step before it goes to the floor, that’s Ways and Means. As soon as that’s over, then we will talk to the chairman, talk to our members and bring it forward.”
Scalise said he would like to hold a House floor vote on the legislation before year’s end.
“But again, we have to get it through the committee process,” he said.
A Ways and Means spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, though Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) said in July that his panel was discussing the bill “pretty much daily.”
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins warned Monday that President Donald Trump would be defying Congress if he moves forward with empowering top political appointees to decide who gets grant funding for health research.
“Any attempt to politicize grantmaking … is contrary to congressional intent,” the Maine Republican said in a statement.
Trump wants to issue an executive order to seat White House budget director Russ Vought and National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya on a board that would decide which grants the NIH should fund, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to describe a private meeting in the Oval Office last Friday.
Following reports of that meeting, Collins noted Monday that the stopgap funding patch Congress cleared this summer bars the White House from finalizing a separate proposed rule to put political appointees in charge of approving federal grants, or “any substantially similar” plan.
The Office of Management and Budget “should not be involved in agency decisions on the awards of grants,” Collins said, adding that “imposing a political review … undermines the long-standing principle that the government funds awards based on scientific need and merit, rather than political ideology.”
Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the House’s top Democratic appropriator, called the White House’s latest idea an attempt to “take control over federal funding, so they can use it to punish their perceived enemies and reward their friends.”
Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate’s top Democratic appropriator, warned that the move would mean “a single political appointee could kill a cancer study or an Alzheimer’s trial with no scientific reason at all.”
A spokesperson for House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole did not return a request for comment regarding the Oklahoma Republican’s position.
Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) on Monday expressed frustration over the ongoing war in Iran and its impact on Iowans’ pocketbooks, publicly distancing herself from President Donald Trump ahead of November’s rapidly approaching midterm elections.
“Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran,” Hinson said in a post to social media on Monday. “We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices.”
It’s the second time Hinson, the GOP candidate in Iowa’s critical Senate race and a loyal ally of Trump’s, has expressed concerns over the war. In June, Blue Light News obtained audio of Hinson warning the war could become a “political liability” if it continued much longer. Hinson did not mention Trump by name in her Monday statement.
Hinson called for suspending the gas tax, pausing diesel exports and creating a diesel relief program to help farmers and truckers “being crushed by the high costs,” among several other possible solutions.
“These actions to lower costs are needed ASAP, and the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end,” she added.
Gas and diesel prices have soared over the duration of the war with Iran, which began in February. Regular gas was just over $4.45 per gallon on Monday, according to AAA, and diesel prices hit a record high of $6.50 per gallon.
Trump and members of his administration have dismissed concerns over the costs.
“You have a little higher. It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done,” Trump said during a campaign stop in North Carolina last week. “Remember that. It’s a little more. Frankly, even if it was a lot more.”
Hinston on Monday said she will “work with anyone who is ready to tackle this challenge immediately.”
Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, a senior Appropriations Committee Republican, questioned whether federal funds should be spent on construction of President Donald Trump’s triumphal arch, which the president claimed over the weekend could be used for military purposes.
“There’s a lot of things that we need the military funding for — in fact, we’re short on military funding right now,” Simpson told reporters at the Capitol Monday.
“If it was my choice, I wouldn’t put any of that money into the arch,” Simpson added, when pressed on whether Pentagon funding should be used at all.
Simpson spoke a day after Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that the arch — which he wants to build less than a mile from the Pentagon, just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial — would be used to store and deploy drones and snipers.
Given that rationale, Simpson said the arch is “something that needs to be debated” and that other Defense Department needs should take priority.
“I hope if they decide to do it, that they would come to Congress and ask for an appropriation for it if they’re going to use appropriated dollars to do it,” Simpson said.
Simpson also questioned Trump’s ban of three news outlets over the weekend, including Blue Light News, as well a recent comments from House Rules Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) suggesting members of the media should be barred from the the Speakers Lobby, a space just off the House floor. He called any such media ban “wrong.”
“Just because you don’t like what the press is reporting — or the fact that they wouldn’t call it the Gulf of America or something else like that — that’s not the reason to ban the press,” he said. “You should never ban the press. The press is what keeps us honest. So I don’t like what they’re doing.”
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