As summer travel season arrives, Congress is considering suspending the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax, which largely funds the nation's highway and transit capital spending, for the first time ever. Democratic Senators Mark Kelly and Richard Blumenthal proposed a 'gas-tax holiday' in March; Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill to suspend the tax. Donald Trump has urged doing so. GOP Senator Mike Lee'who, as recently as 2022, said that letting Joe Biden pause the gas tax would be 'treacherous' and 'wrong''wrote on X that it might as well be abolished altogether. Graham Platner, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate from Maine, has proposed the same. A pause is unlikely to happen: Several key senators are opposed. That it is being considered at all is a sign of the gas tax's zombie status, not yet dead but not really alive. 'It's not as important as it used to be in any dimension,' Severin Borenstein, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley's Haas School of...
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