Senate Steers Highway Spending Out Of Budget Amendment Would Have Added $11.6 Billion To Federal Projects

As House members packed their bags to leave town, the Senate on Thursday voted down the last major amendment to the budget resolution as it moved toward a congressional commitment to balance the budget by 2002.

With a final vote scheduled for today, senators killed a proposal to add $11.6 billion for federal highway projects over the next five years, on a 51-to-49 vote.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., and author of the proposal, complained that surplus revenue from the 18.3-cent-a-gallon federal gasoline tax had been used for many years to keep the deficit down instead of being spent on roads.

“The budget resolution,” he said, “is a broken promise with American drivers who faithfully pay gas taxes and expect to see the nation’s highways and transit systems maintained.”

But 35 Republicans and 16 Democrats voted to kill the proposal, while 20 Republicans and 29 Democrats voted for it. The narrow margin was comparable to the 216-to-214 vote in the House, early Wednesday just before House members adopted the budget resolution, not to add about $12 billion for asphalt.

Another measure, offered by Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, D-Ill., would have set aside $5 billion in federal money to help rebuild crumbling schools around the country. It was defeated 56 to 43.

While the Senate debated and voted on other amendments, none were adopted except for a handful of almost meaningless “Sense of the Senate” statements voicing hopes about the budgetary future. For example, one offered by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., expressed the will of the Senate to assure that tax cuts benefit the middle class.

Congressional budget resolutions do not enact specific tax and spending measures, but they establish limits on the extent to which taxes may be cut or how much spending may be increased. This agreement is the fifth in a series of congressional actions that began in 1978 and pledged a balanced budget at some future date. The first four of these were laws, but they were not effective. The one now under discussion is only a resolution.

The deal includes $85 billion in net tax cuts; $115 billion in reduced Medicare spending, to be achieved mostly by cutting payments to providers, and $13.6 billion in reduced spending for Medicaid.

There is no doubt that the House and the Senate will agree - after the holiday break - on a final version of the budget resolution.