A little bipartisanship would help during lame duck session

Could it be that President Ba- rack Obama’s unlikely new best friend in the lame duck session of 111th Congress is Republican George V. Voinovich of Ohio?

The senior senator from Ohio has made no secret of his desire to see passage of a multi-year surface transportation reauthorization bill — call it a $500 billion highway construction bill for short.

He has written three letters reminding Obama of the president’s past pledges to support the transportation bill. That would certainly seem to indicate a strong desire on the part of Ohio’s retiring senator to work with the White House in making the lame duck session a productive one. Voinovich is no political babe in the woods, and knows that supporting legislative initiatives is not a one-way street.

Voinovich joined with Democrats to support the Small Business Jobs and Credit Act of 2010 and even issued a release saying he regretted that couldn’t be at the White House when President Obama signed the bill because he had to be in Ohio that day.

Helping small business

The bill contained a number of small business tax breaks, expanded Small Business Administration loan programs, provided tax incentives for new small business investment, and expanded small business access to credit. It is a testament to the highly partisan atmosphere in Washington this year that the bill didn’t receive overwhelming bipartisan support.

It would send a message to the American electorate if Congress, which allowed itself to be hamstrung through most of 2010 and much of 2009, could use the brief period allotted to the lame duck Congress to get some things done. Lame duck sessions are not the ideal vehicle for passing legislation, at least in normal times. But these have been extraordinarily contentious times.

Voinovich is the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and he has invested a lot of time and energy in the surface transportation bill. Unlike some of his colleagues, Voinovich sees the value of investing in infrastructure — for the jobs highway work creates now and for the on-going contribution a good highway system makes to the economy. Those two factors haven’t changed since President Dwight D. Eisenhower championed the interstate highway system almost 60 years ago.

No shortage of possibilities

Let’s hope Voinovich gets his wish for passage of the highway bill before the end of the year, but there is no shortage of other major issues that also need attention in this short time frame. Voinovich could be a potential swing vote in some cases, especially if Republicans continue to stymie the administration with filibusters in the Senate.

Obviously a tax bill must be passed or all of what are called the Bush tax cuts are going to expire. It is worth noting that the tax cuts were designed to expire because making them permanent would have made it impossible for George W. Bush to predict that the nation would eventually work its way out of deficit spending. That fact hasn’t changed. While allowing all the cuts to expire would send the economy into a tailspin, a compromise that recognizes the long-term effects of the cuts on the deficit must be reached.

Also on the agenda is a new arms-reduction treaty with Russia, a dozen spending bills that Congress put off earlier this year and a response to the recommendations of the president’s deficit-reduction commission.

The White House and both parties have other legislative priorities as well, which will provide a challenge for a Congress that was far more willing to fight than switch in the year leading up to the elections.

Some bipartisan cooperation would be a welcome change.