LaTourette helps break FAA logjam
Friday, August 05, 2011
LaTourette helps break FAA logjam
By: Plain Dealer Editorial Board
The headlines are doubtless crediting Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner with reaching an
agreement to return the Federal Aviation Administration to full
operation, put nearly 75,000 people back to work, keep 250
construction projects -- three in Cleveland -- moving forward and
allow the government to collect $30 million a day in ticket taxes.
But credit Rep. Steve LaTourette with an assist.
Maybe a big one.
The Bainbridge Township Republican held a press conference in
Washington Thursday where he named names and mapped out a path to
compromise. Within two hours, Reid, Boehner and Transportation
Secretary Ray LaHood had taken that path, thus bringing to an end
the latest chapter of government dysfunction.
LaTourette conceded that a stopgap FAA funding bill -- passed by
the House on July 20 and stuck in the Senate even after the agency
stopped all nonessential work two days later -- did include a
provision to cut subsidies for a handful of remote airports. But
so, he noted, did a permanent FAA reauthorization that passed the
Senate with 87 votes. When top Senate Democrats, led by Jay
Rockefeller of West Virginia, demanded a "clean bill," LaTourette
was dispatched by Boehner with an offer to drop the offending
language. But that upset Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, who had
led the anti-subsidy effort in the Senate.
This isn't a House vs. Senate problem, said LaTourette. It's not
really a partisan problem. It's a clash between two Senate bulls,
Rockefeller and Coburn, whose pictures he displayed for all C-SPAN
watchers to see. It's also an impasse with a bypass: The bill
allows LaHood to continue the subsidies at his discretion.
That's apparently what will happen. Reid said the Senate would
pass the House bill by unanimous consent -- which means his warring
colleagues have backed off. And LaHood will waive the subsidy cuts.
Crisis over. For now, anyway.