Brief Book Look: All Roads Lead to Congress

Remember a post a week or so ago about DVRPC and expanded SEPTA and MTA routes? There was an acronym in that post, SAFETEA-LU (Safe, Accountable, Flexible, and Efficient Transportation Equity Act – A Legacy for Users). If you found this intriguing, today is your lucky day, because there’s an entire book about the introduction and passage of SAFETEA-LU and its predecessor SAFETEA.

All Roads Lead to Congress: The $300 Billion Fight over Highway Funding by Costas Panagopoulos and Joshua Schank (CQ Press, 2008).

This is the grown up version of the Schoolhouse Rock song “How a Bill Becomes a Law.” A great deal of attention is given to the role of staff in shepherding legislation through the process, over the bodies of congressional colleagues if necessary. The two authors interned in Sen. Clinton’s office as these bills moved through the House and Senate. To be honest, I didn’t make it through the whole thing. Some of the acronyms got in the way. My favorite was LUST (Leaking Underground Storage Tanks) fund (p. 19). We also learn that the LU part of SAFETEA-LU came in because Rep. Don Young of Alaska wanted to name the bill after his wife Lu so he made up the words to form that part of the acronym (p. 108). Really, that’s what the book says.

It was written recently enough that the preface mentions the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

Pennsylvania gets a few mentions. The most informative is:

For example, Pennsylvania was one of the biggest donee states coming out of TEA-21 in 1998. While some of this can be explained by the state’s high transit use in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, its positive cash flow can also be attributed to the fact that Rep. Bud Shuster, who represented the south central 9th district of Pennsylvania, was chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee from 1995 to 2001 (p. 35)

Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum also get mentioned, Specter more favorably as I read things.

So if you want the straight skinny on how exactly that legislative sausage gets made, or if you have a vested interest in transportation issues, this is the book for you.