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@RandPaul: It’s a good thing we have Republican control of Congress or the Democrats might bust the budget caps, fund planned parenthood and Obamacare, and sneak gun control without due process into an Omni...wait, what?

Multiple lawmakers left a meeting with House Republican leadership on Monday night, confirming that the House version of the omnibus spending bill will not include an Obamacare bailout package proposed by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Susan Collins (R-ME). Congress must pass the omnibus spending bill before midnight Friday or the government will shut down. The proposed bailout package would include Obamacare’s cost-sharing reduction subsidies for three years and funding a federal reinsurance program for three years in exchange for increased flexibility for states through federal waivers. The program would also expand eligibility for Obamacare “copper” plans. The removal of...

“MASON CITY: To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.” — Robert Penn Warren, “All the King’s Men” (1946) WASHINGTON — Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Long’s Louisiana career, with a rolling sentence about a road. Time was, infrastructure — roads, especially — was a preoccupation of populists, who were mostly rural and needed roads to get products to market, and for travel to neighbors and towns, which assuaged loneliness. Today, there is no comparably sympathetic constituency clamoring...

In the wake of the recent horrific shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a number of proposals involving federal grant programs have been offered in Congress to try to address the critical issue of school safety. Empowering states and localities to implement evidence-based programs that meet their needs represents a sensible approach. Among the proposals under consideration is the Students, Teachers, and Officers Preventing (STOP) School Violence Act of 2018, which has been introduced in the House by Rep. John Rutherford, R-Fla., a former sheriff, and in the Senate by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. Both House...

MILWAUKEE -- Milwaukee drivers will deal with orange barrels on the freeways for the next 10 years even if Congress passes a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, the head of the a Wisconsin transportation group said. Pat Goss, executive director of the Transportation Builders Association, says the state hasn't put itself in a position to use the federal money for two Milwaukee County freeway projects eliminated in 2017. That year, Gov. Scott Walker delayed construction on Interstate 41 north of the Zoo Interchange and abandoned plans to rebuild Interstate 94 past Miller Park because of a funding shortfall. Don't expect a $1.5...

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WASHINGTON — The two-year-old high-tech system that allows the Interstate 66 “red X” lanes to be opened outside of rush hour will be taken down within the next 12 months, WTOP has learned.The active traffic management system, which includes digital signs over each lane on a stretch of about 12 miles of I-66 just outside the Capital Beltway, cost $39 million. Work began in 2013; the system was first activated in September 2015.Construction on two HOV or toll lanes in each direction between the Beltway and Gainesville is set to ramp up this spring, and that will disrupt the system....

The final leg of Interstate 69 from Martinsville to Indianapolis will cost nearly $1.6 billion.ThatÂ’s according to the Final Environmental Impact Statement for I-69 Section 6 the state released Thursday. The analysis says construction could start in 2020 and wrap up within six years.Section 6 will run along the existing route of State Road 37. That means some of the many businesses that line the highway in Morgan, Johnson and Marion counties will have to move.The FEIS says more than 80 businesses, including a non-profit and fire station, will need to relocate. ThatÂ’s in addition to nearly 200 residences that...

A coalition of local leaders backed by the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce wants voters to approve a sales tax increase on the November ballot to pay for projects like the widening of Interstate 25 and the buildout of bike lanes. The group filed four ballot measures with the Secretary of State on Thursday that would raise between $500 million and $1 billion for transportation projects, according to the chamber, and allow that money to be used to pay for bonds, which would generate even more upfront cash. A booming population across the Front Range has created traffic snarls on...

Imagine you open the faucet of your kitchen sink expecting water and instead out comes cash. Now imagine that it comes out at the rate of $1 million a minute. You call your plumber, who thinks you’re crazy. To get you off the phone, he opines that it is your sink and therefore must be your money. So you spend it wildly. Then you realize that the money wasn’t yours and you owe it back. Now imagine that this happens every minute of every day for the next three years. At the end of the three years, you owe back...

WAYNESBORO — President Trump's national infrastructure plan announced Monday that calls for a $1.5 trillion investment in roads, bridges and the rest of America's crumbling infrastructure, provides for about $200 billion in federal funds. The remainder of dollars would have to come from state, local and private sources. For the Shenandoah Valley, the good infrastructure plan news includes funding to help with the maintenance backlog in the national parks, including Shenandoah National Park, where there is a $56 million maintenance backlog. However, a couple of local government officials and one of Virginia's U.S. senators interviewed expressed doubt about the trickle...

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump's $4.4 trillion budget plan would slash funding for interstate highways, jeopardizing New York's plan to transform a stretch of Interstate 81 in Syracuse in the next decade, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer said Tuesday. The plan unveiled Monday by the White House would cut the federal Highway Trust Fund by $122 billion over 10 years, drying up the main source of federal aid to the states for road projects and mass transit. Schumer said such a deep cut would make it more difficult for New York state to compete for federal money to demolish the elevated...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Construction has begun on Rhode Island's new tractor trailer tolling system.The Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) crews began installing the first two of 14 planned gantry locations by Exits 2 and 5 on Interstate 95.Lane closures are in effect through next week, then the contractor will test the new system for about a month. These gantries are expected to begin charging trucks by mid-March, once everything is working properly.The ongoing construction is not halting the plans of the Rhode Island Trucking Association (RITA) to sue the state. "It's discriminatory," said RITA President Chris Maxwell. You can't...

President Trump on Monday rolled out a White House budget that includes deep cuts to some federal agencies, an increase in funding for the Pentagon and $18 billion for a wall on the Mexican border. It includes proposals to cut deficits by more than $3 trillion over a decade and lower debt levels as a percentage of the gross domestic product, but does not balance by doing away with annual deficits.

I am not much one for rubbernecking at car crashes. (I’m not setting you up for a Congress joke, here. That comes later.) Most of the time they are scary but ultimately insignificant episodes involving a little property damage and a great deal of inconvenience. Sometimes they are much worse, and I couldn’t help looking at the car blazing in the middle of the freeway in the middle of the day, looking more like it had been bombed or hit with a rocket than like it had been involved in an accident. Thick black smoke covered both sides of the...

Conservatives in Congress and in the hinterlands are bitterly complaining about the massive insult to fiscal sanity the budget deal passed on Thursday morning represents. Even worse, some Republicans are offended by the pushback. Their target is Senator Rand Paul who, almost alone, tried to stand in the way of the budget deal in the Senate. GOP political analyst Susan Del Percio said on MSNBC that it was the day "the tea party died." DEL PERCIO: And it’s amazing we’re not even coming close to talking about entitlement reform, so I kind of look at today as the day the...

The White House on Monday will unveil its long-awaited $1.5 trillion infrastructure package aimed at overhauling U.S. public works. The plan is structured around four goals: generate $1.5 trillion for an infrastructure proposal, streamline the permitting process down to two years, invest in rural infrastructure projects and advance workforce training. The current system is fundamentally broken and it’s broken in two different ways,” a senior administration official told reporters in a Saturday phone call. “We are underinvesting in our infrastructure, and we have a permitting process that takes so long that even when funds are adequate, it can take a...

Warning: This post contains numbers that may upset anyone who dreams of a smaller government. With the Senate budget deal announced yesterday, congressional Republicans have proved that they aren't merely big spenders: They bear primary responsibility for Washington's complete lack of fiscal responsibility. At the same time, they have reaffirmed the fact that bipartisanship means a determination to spend us into oblivion. The bipartisan budget deal that the senators proclaimed so proudly yesterday would add $300 billion over two years to discretionary spending, not counting emergency funds and other add-ons. It would yet again burst the budget caps that Republicans...

WASHINGTON — Just add cash. That was the ingredient Republican and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill needed to strike and pass a long-term budget deal after months of bitter fighting across and within party lines about how to spend funds that had been limited by budget caps. An $89 billion injection "changes a lot of votes," explained North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, the chairman of Republicans' arch-conservative Freedom Caucus and an opponent of the bill, hours before it passed. And that figure, an important factor in securing the support of lawmakers from the Republican-heavy states of Texas and Florida, only...

Some people have called for a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution as a means of reining in a big-spending Congress. That’s a misguided vision, for the simple reason that in any real economic sense, as opposed to an accounting sense, the federal budget is always balanced. The value of what we produced in 2017—our gross domestic product—totaled about $19 trillion. If the Congress spent $4 trillion of the $19 trillion that we produced, unless you believe in Santa Claus, you know that Congress must force us to spend $4 trillion less privately. Taxing us is one way that Congress...