Rebecca Cook / Reuters House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) (L) shakes hands with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the basement of the Capitol before the start of the U.S. Senate Majority Conference meeting on July 7, 2018.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) threatened to withhold support for a bill extending federal highway and infrastructure funding if the Republicans can’t submit the text by a Tuesday deadline.
“We have to be able to review what we’re getting. We have to have a bill on the floor by Tuesday. We do not want to see the highway bill delayed by wanting to have a longer-term infrastructure bill that would be something different,” Pelosi said at a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor.
If the Republican-controlled Congress cannot schedule a vote on the highway funding measure by the Tuesday deadline, Pelosi said that all federal highway and infrastructure infrastructure programs could be on hold until a “clean” funding bill is passed, which she said Republicans have threatened to do in recent weeks.
Pelosi said that she does not believe the states would shut down federal highway funding, but added that she was not confident the money would get through the fiscal year, which expires September 30. But she added that she had yet to discuss any potential actions in the event of a “no” vote, and did not make clear whether her party would hold votes on separate measures if the highway funding measure failed.
Another $50 billion increase to the Highway Trust Fund has been proposed as part of a legislative package aimed at averting a federal government shutdown.
