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Last week, when House Speaker John Boehner indicated his willingness to bring up the Senate transportation bill, it seemed like an admission of defeat for the brazenly partisan approach and insanely destructive policies the Republicans have been promoting. But it’s not over yet.

Check out the nuances of Boehner’s statement, quoted in The Hill last Thursday:

“As I told the members yesterday, the current plan is to see what the Senate can produce and to bring their bill up,” Boehner told reporters at his weekly news conference Thursday.

“In the meantime, we’re going to continue to have conversations with our members about a longer term approach, which frankly most of our members want. But at this point in time, the plan is to bring up the Senate bill – or something like it.”

House members are away from the Capitol this week on recess, but this is when the GOP leadership is having those “conversations.” And when Boehner said he’ll be discussing a “longer term approach,” what he means is a bill that gives short shrift to transit, biking, and walking so the House can squeeze out more money for highways — and hence more years of spending for their bill.

The GOP bill has too much oil drilling to win votes from the Democratic side of the aisle. But if leadership can buy time to convince enough hesitant Republicans that they’re better off supporting Boehner’s bill than the bipartisan Senate bill, they could yet gather together enough votes to set up a showdown with the Senate.

So if you want to protect policies that invest in transit and safe streets, this is no time to rest on your laurels. Even with the House in recess, advocates are gearing up for a last push this week to make sure the bill is really, truly dead.

The sun rose this morning on a landscape considerably different from the one described by not one but two articles Streetsblog published yesterday.

Senate Bill Gets Bigger, Better, But Harder to Move

Senator Harry Reid took a lot of business into his own hands yesterday, unveiling his updated version of the Senate’s “two year” bill (it’s really only ever been 18 months), and incorporating the Cardin-Cochran amendment that grants metro areas greater control over bike-ped spending.

Why now? A couple of potential roadblocks fell and Reid probably saw an opportunity. First, the Senate voted down Roy Blunt’s contraception amendment. At the same time, Egypt let the American NGO employees there leave the country, clearing a second “non-germane” amendment to the transportation bill. That only leaves a Keystone XL pipeline amendment… and about a hundred more.

Reid’s inclusion of Cardin-Cochran is good news in that it eliminates the need for a separate vote on that particular amendment. However, Reid’s strategy also sets up a cloture vote on the entire package, which could come as early as next Tuesday. Cloture requires 60 votes to pass (the Democratic caucus controls only 53 seats), and so far, Reid is only 1-for-2 in cloture votes on the transportation bill. If this next vote fails, he will still have to find a way of dealing with the remaining amendments.

He will find it very difficult to bring Republicans over to his side, and it may be getting harder to keep the Democrats in line. Members of both parties are tiring of Reid’s tendency to “fill the tree,” using his authority as majority leader to prevent others from amending the bill (which he also did yesterday).

Two Democrats already broke ranks to vote for the Blunt amendment yesterday, so you can’t say Reid doesn’t know what he’s up against.

House Bill Shrinks to Nothing, Still Stinks

First it was a six-year transportation bill. Then it was a five-year drilling, transportation, and pension reform bill. Then, just for the first half of this week, it was an 18-month bill.

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Gas prices, you may have heard, are on the rise again. And so is pandering about pain at the pump. Four years after $4 a gallon gas spawned “Drill, Baby, Drill” and insane political gimmickry on the presidential campaign trail (remember the “gas tax holiday” favored by John McCain and Hillary Clinton?), gas price populism is back with a vengeance.

To hear House Speaker John Boehner tell it, oil drilling and highways are all it takes to liberate American families from the tyranny of the pump. The Republican presidential candidates are also promising to reduce the price of gas through the magic of drilling. Even Ron Paul — the guy who supposedly gets how markets work — posits that he could bring about dime a gallon gas.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are flailing away at phantom price gougers and Wall Street speculators. Even President Obama, who never fell for the gas tax holiday while campaigning in 2008, is exaggerating the potential of alternative fuels to substitute for gas.

As Dave Roberts pointed out on Grist last week, with the exception of New Mexico’s Jeff Bingaman, just about everyone in the Senate seems scared to come out and face reality. Gas prices are set largely by the global oil market, and the only sure way to protect Americans from high prices at the pump is to make it easier to use less gas.

Even with the House and Senate neck deep in the process of updating national transportation policy, few in Congress are willing to point out the obvious: The next transportation bill is a golden opportunity to save Americans money by giving them more affordable ways to get around.

A 2006 study found that working families in 28 American metro areas spend, on average, 29 percent of household income on transportation — even more than they spend on housing [PDF]. And a two-person adult household that uses transit saves an average of $6,251 per year compared to a household with two cars and no transit access, according to the Complete Streets Coalition [PDF].

In other words, by investing in transit and safe streets Congress can help Americans unlock huge savings – much more than the typical family saw from the most recent round of tax cuts.

Instead, Boehner and the House GOP leadership put out a bill that doubled down on car dependence, yanking away dedicated funding for transit, biking and walking. While it looks like the House GOP is going to abandon their outright attack on transit, early indications are that their Plan B will shortchange investment in more affordable transportation too. Boehner still thinks “drill and drive” is a winning message.

So someone’s got to say it: John Boehner’s transportation policy is a recipe for impoverishing people. Americans can’t afford a transportation bill that forces families to burn fuel every time they want to go somewhere.

Hold that victory lap: While it’s true that House Republicans are revamping their transportation bill, it’s time once again wait and see just how bad the bill still is.

Indications out of Speaker John Boehner’s office are that the GOP leadership will no longer try to eliminate dedicated transit funding, but odds are that some serious problems with the bill will persist:

• It eliminates bike-ped programs.

We’ll have to wait and see exactly what happens to popular programs like Transportation Enhancements, Safe Routes to School, and Recreational Trails once the new bill is released. The previous House bill would have cut the dedicated funding stream for these programs, forcing bike-ped investments to compete for general fund dollars along with transit. To fully restore bike-ped funding, the House will have to ensure that these programs have a dedicated revenue stream and aren’t supported by the same pot that funds transit.

• It increases dependence on oil.

Boehner’s spokesperson said yesterday that the new bill will “retain the speaker’s vision of linking infrastructure to expanded American energy production.” That’s not a surprise, since H.R. 3408, the bill that opens up swaths of the country’s land and sea for drilling and includes the Keystone XL pipeline provision, has already passed the House. Tying infrastructure to drilling means deepening, not reversing, dependence on fossil fuels and environmentally damaging extraction techniques like fracking.

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While there is no official statement yet, sources on the Hill (and CQ for subscribers) are saying that House Republicans are revamping their 5-year, $260 billion transportation bill and will discard their proposal to eradicate the dedicated transit funding mechanism enacted by Ronald Reagan in 1983. The bill is unlikely to see floor debate next week.

Michael Steel, a spokesperson for Speaker John Boehner, told the National Journal today:

Given Senate Democrats’ unwillingness to pursue a longer-term infrastructure and energy plan, House Republican leaders are considering a revamped approach that would retain the speaker’s vision of linking infrastructure to expanded American energy production, and allow Republicans to stay on offense on energy and jobs.

According to one Hill staffer, if the GOP are blaming Democrats for refusing to cooperate, it likely means they didn’t have the support they needed within their own party to win a simple majority. The source said the bill was facing negative reactions from the transportation industry and advocates, as well as more spending-averse representatives from the far right wing.

Whatever the House GOP offers in its place will not kick transit funding out of the highway trust fund, the source said. That would fix a huge flaw in the bill, but as T4America points out, there are many more shortcomings that need to be addressed.

Boehner already had to delay floor debate on his transportation bill before the President’s Day recess began. Streetsblog will have more on this story as it develops.

Congress is in recess, and the House’s atrocious transportation bill has been dismembered and delayed, but if you want to preserve funding for transit and active transportation, don’t let your guard down yet. There’s still plenty to watch out for as the House and Senate attempt to reauthorize federal transportation programs. As we’ve reported, there are some stark differences between the House and Senate bills. But what is scariest may be their similarities.

When two companion pieces of legislation pass their respective chambers, they are combined by a conference committee. The committee is made up of members of both the House and the Senate, and it is their job to resolve differences between the two bills. (Most recently, a conference committee forged a compromise on extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment insurance.)

Committee members are limited in that for each provision, they must choose either one chamber’s version or the other’s — they generally do not have the power to come up with something new on the spot. Furthermore, if the two bills agree on something, that provision can’t be altered by the conference committee.

There are already good chunks of the House and Senate bill that are the same — eliminating dedicated bike-ped funding, for instance. The House bill admittedly goes much further than the Senate’s, but if the two bills were to be conferenced right now, Safe Routes to School, Transportation Enhancements and Recreational Trails would all be history. The committee would then have to choose how to weaken those programs: eliminate them altogether, like the House bill, or keep them eligible under Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program but let states opt out of them. Another critical choice: fund CMAQ from the Highway Trust Fund, as in the Senate bill, or fund it from the the smoke-and-mirrors “alternative transportation account” envisioned in the House bill.

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On January 6, 1983, the icon of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan, signed legislation to raise the gas tax for the first time in more than two decades, devoting a portion of the revenue to transit.

We’ve been reading about this moment a lot, as the current GOP leadership in the House tries to undo Reagan’s legacy by eviscerating dedicated transit funding.

In this ABC News clip, you can see that Reagan touted the measure, a five cent gas tax increase, as an economic catalyst. It would raise $5.5 billion for transportation investment and result in 320,000 new jobs, the administration said. The measure even reserved one cent per gallon for transit, all for the cost of about $30 a year for the average driver.

Sounds like a win-win, right? After some initial resistance to the idea, Reagan eventually came around to that perspective, even if some special interest groups (truckers) didn’t.

What a difference 29 years makes.

Yesterday the House debated the GOP leadership’s oil drilling-with-a-side-of-highways bill, which may or may not survive the House floor.

A lot of folks are upset about this proposal, which would eliminate dedicated federal funding for transit, biking, and walking, open up some of the country’s environmental treasures to oil drilling and delay infrastructure insolvency for all of two years.

Leave it to Oregon’s Earl Blumenauer to really let ‘em have it. The Hill reports that Blumenauer delivered an impassioned speech accompanied by this sign that really hits home.

Some highlights below:

This is a wildly popular program, costing a fraction of a percent of the transportation budget, and it’s had a huge impact nationally on our children because it deals with real consequences for them.

Doesn’t it make sense to do something about the congestion, the injury, the death and the obesity?

So why are my Republican friends advancing a transportation bill attacking Safe Routes to School, stripping it out, making it an unsafe route to school? Well, it’s a fitting metaphor for perhaps the worst transportation bill in history.

Well said, sir.

First, John Boehner split his transportation bill into three smaller bills that deal with transportation, oil and gas drilling, and government employee pensions separately. Now, it looks like the transportation component won’t be voted on until after the President’s Day recess, according to Politico:

Boehner’s office attributed the decision to two factors: One of the offsets in the payroll tax cut agreement is a reduction in pension benefits for federal workers that overlaps with a cost offset in the highway bill, plus a thick docket of amendments makes it more difficult to finish the bill by the end of this week.

Left unsaid in Boehner’s rationale is the difficulty that Republican leaders have had in assembling the necessary vote for a bill that funds surface transportation programs, opens up oil drilling and cuts back on the federal contribution to government workers’ pensions.

The news is a sign that Boehner’s attack on transit and street safety programs is treading on thin ice, but defeating the House GOP’s highways and drilling initiative is far from guaranteed.

Delaying the vote on the transportation portion frees up the House to first take up the energy-only portion, which expands offshore and arctic oil and gas drilling and contains the Keystone XL pipeline provision. That bill will be debated and possibly voted on by the entire House today.

For Boehner, the key is still the transportation portion, known as H.R. 7. Last night the House Rules Committee established that if H.R. 7 does not pass, then the energy and pension reform bills cannot be recombined and would head to the Senate individually. It is unlikely that an isolated drilling bill would find much support in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The White House issued a statement yesterday that spelled out President Obama’s opposition to the House transportation bill, also known as H.R. 7. The administration’s statement of policy, which coincided with the House Rules Committee hearing on H.R. 7, takes a stand in defense of transit, safety, and the environment:

H.R. 7 does not reflect the historically bipartisan nature of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The Administration has serious concerns with provisions in the bill that would make America’s roads, rails, and transit systems less safe, reduce the transportation options available to America’s traveling public, short circuit local decision-making, and turn back the clock on environmental and labor protections…

Because this bill jeopardizes safety, weakens environmental and labor protections, and fails to make the investments needed to strengthen the Nation’s roads, bridges, rail, and transit systems, the President’s senior advisors would recommend that he veto this legislation.

The announcement makes Obama the highest-profile critic of the House transportation bill, a group that already included Secretary LaHood, hundreds of advocacy groups, heavy-hitting lobbyists representing big business, and a growing number of Republican congressmen.

President Obama had already endorsed the Senate’s two-year transportation bill proposal, which so far has received bipartisan support. But that was before the President’s budget called for $476 billion in transportation investment over six years, a proposal that goes above and beyond anything that the House and Senate have been working on. LaHood is defending the administration’s transportation budget today before the Senate Budget Committee.

It will be interesting to see how Obama’s statement affects what happens in Congress. Yesterday, House Republicans split their transportation bill into three smaller bills, which will be debated and voted on separately, presumably to maximize the chances of each part passing. The component of the bill that robs transit of dedicated funding still may not have the votes to pass. With the current extension of the last transportation bill set to expire on March 31, the House will still have to take some sort of action if H.R. 7 goes nowhere.

One thing isn’t in doubt: By putting out a proposal that departs so radically from 30 years of transportation policy, begun under Ronald Reagan no less, Boehner was practically begging to start a high-profile political fight over this bill. As election season heats up and the administration responds to the House GOP’s attack on transit and street safety programs, it looks like national transportation policy will continue to be in the spotlight.