The Highway Bill
Floor Speech
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Mrs. BOXER. Madam President, if I could say to both leaders, whom I respect tremendously--and I agree with Leader Reid 99.9 percent of the time--this is the situation: We have a highway trust fund expiring, going bust, going broke, and, yes, we have to spend some time. You know, we have a lot of staff; we can divide this up--250 pages, 4 people. We have a summary. We have a summary of the bill out there for everybody, and we can just say we need 4 weeks or 6 weeks to look at it.
The EPW piece, as my friend Senator Inhofe knows, has been out there for 3 months--not that long; at least 2 months. We haven't changed much in that. It has been out there, so that has been reviewed.
All I want to say is this: If we could just keep our eye on the prize--and I understand that the way we proceed over here is important. That is why I voted no, not to go to a bill I wrote with Senator McConnell, because I agree with my leader completely. We need a chance to look at it. But I would submit that this isn't the first time we have ever done a highway bill. This is a little different from a health care bill in the sense that it is a highway bill. Most of it is very similar. I would say EPW builds off the old bill we had before, and most of the bills track older bills.
I don't think it is going to be that hard for us to detail our staff to read it because--here is the problem--if we don't, we have 800,000 construction workers who are still not back to work, and we have 7 States that have stopped doing anything. So if we could just keep our eye on the prize, which is businesses being able to do what they want to do: build--I had a bridge collapse 2 days ago. You can't get from California to Arizona.
So I hope that tomorrow we will be able to join with our friends and vote to proceed. If we don't like the bill, we will have three more opportunities to vote no. But I would love to get on this bill, get moving on it, and see if we can keep this economy moving in the right direction and not take a chance, as many economists said we will, if we don't do a long-term bill.
I yield the floor.
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