Congress again demonstrates the high cost of gridlock

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money is a phrase attributed to former Illinois Sen. Everett Dirksen and has been around for about a half century.

Nowadays in Washington, billions have been replaced by trillions as the measure of profligacy. But when Dirksen arrived in the Senate in 1959, the federal budget was $75 billion.

Still, a billion dollars is nothing to sniff at, and when Congress, through yet another demonstration of partisan gridlock, endangers that amount in income to the Federal Aviation Administration, people ought to take note.

Even more than the loss of income due to the failure of Congress to pass a funding bill for the FAA is the loss of jobs — good paying construction jobs on the payrolls of private companies that bid on some $10 billion in airport projects across the country. The work ranged from runway paving to the construction of control towers.

At least 24,000 construction jobs were directly affected, and an estimated tens of thousands more in supplier jobs. Also, 4,000 FAA employees were furloughed.

Finally, an estimated $350 million in taxes that should have gone to the FAA were uncollected and if the stalemate had been allowed to run its course for five more weeks after most members of Congress left Washington, the loss would have exceeded $1 billion.

Late Thursday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced a compromise had been reached that involved the Senate passing a House temporary funding measure, with an understanding that a provision in that bill to which Democrats objected would be negated by an executive waiver from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Getting a break

Assuming that this comes to pass today — under Senate rules any single senator could stop the bill in its tracks — this is good news for those thousands of construction workers, FAA employees and their families.

As has become the custom in Washington these days, Democrats are blaming Republicans, and Republicans are blaming Democrats for inaction on the bill.

But the temporary funding measure is only a patch, and the battle lines already are drawn for when Congress returns in September.

There are two issues in play. The Republican House wants to eliminate subsidies for some rural airports that have insufficient passenger loads to make service profitable for an air carrier.

Republicans also want to use the funding legislation to include a provision that would overturn a rule change made by the National Mediation Board regarding the votes necessary for airline workers to unionize. For 75 years, rail and airline employees have had to have a majority vote of all affected employees for union recognition. The NMB ruling changed that to a majority of the employees who vote in a recognition election.

Either provision was viewed by Democrats as a poison pill in the funding legislation. Both proposals have merits worth arguing, but they should be addressed as separate legislation, not rammed through as part of a funding bill.

The revenue lost over the last two weeks would have funded the airport subsidies in question for a decade. A Congress with math skills such as those gives taxpayers reason to question whether anyone in Washington can think beyond party labels and ideology to do what’s best for the country.