Harry Reid, John Boehner pressure conference committee to make a deal on transportation bill

Still no deal on transportation bill With the June 30 deadline one day closer, congressional leaders have put the screws to the Senate-House conference committee that has been trying to hammer out agreement over a transportation bill. Views about their chances of getting the 47 conferees to make a deal varies from zero to barely better than 50-50. If they can't squeeze an agreement out of the committee, we'll see the 10th extension of the 2005 transportation bill, which expired in 2009. The last extension, for 90 days, was enacted March 29. The next one, if that is the route that ultimately is taken, will be for six months, to get past the November election.

Still at issue after all this time: the "streamlining" of environmental reviews for highway projects (which Republicans want); spending transportation dollars for bike paths and the like (which Democrats want); program consolidations (which Republicans want). And then there are the little matters of mandating approval of the Keystone XL pipeline and EPA regulations governing coal ash.

In the past, transportation bills have been for five years. President Obama wanted a six-year bill with higher spending than the 2005 bill. If the conferees come to agreement, their bill would be good for 18 months. Some House Republicans have previously supported a five-year, $260 billion plan, significantly less than the 2005 bill.   But the best that proposal did was to make it out of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. It then ran into opposition from Democrats and the tea party wing of the GOP. It has never had a vote of the full House. The Senate has passed a bipartisan, two-year, $109 billion bill.

One of the more optimistic comments about where things are going came from Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va) who:

emerged from a Democrats-only meeting in the Capitol Tuesday to say none of the issues was insolvable. 'I still rate it above 50%,' Rahall said of the chances of an agreement before a June 30 deadline.

How far above 50%? 'Fifty-one,' he said.

Freshman negotiator Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.) agreed with with Rahall's tepid assessment. 'Everybody's staring at each other right now and waiting for someone to blink,' he said.

With both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner twisting arms, the alchemy might be transformed to turn the leaden talks into something golden, but that wouldn't be something to bet the mortgage on.

"We're going to talk hour by hour and see if we can get this done," Rep. John Mica (Fla.), the chief House GOP negotiator, told reporters as he emerged from Boehner's office [Tuesday night]. [...]

[Mica's counterpart on the Democratic side, Sen. Barbara] Boxer [D-Calif.] issued a short statement after the meeting, saying only that Boehner and Reid had instructed the conference leaders 'to finish our work this week on the transportation bill.' She said she asked Mica 'to meet continually over the next several days to achieve this deadline.'

If a deal can't be reached, without another extension there would be massive disruption, including job losses. That is because the government would no longer have authority to collect the 18.4 cent per gallon federal gasoline tax that goes into the highway trust fund and pays for surface transportation programs. The House has okayed an extension of the authorization through the end of the 2012 fiscal year on Sept. 30. But the Senate has yet to vote on that bill.