Forty-seven lawmakers from across the spectrum are trying to accomplish a task that once was normal but lately has been a struggle: securing a bipartisan agreement on a transportation bill to authorize funding for roads, bridges, and transit systems.

The 47 senators and House members sit on a conference committee trying to harmonize the sharply different transportation bills the Senate and House passed earlier this year.

There's a nugget of gold amidst the political dross. Tucked into the Senate bill is a pro-conservation provision with a fighting chance of winning bipartisan acceptance: $700 million for the Land and Water Conservation Fund in each of the next two fiscal years. The Senate added the provision to its transportation bill in an impressive 76-22 vote. Now, several House Republicans are circulating a letter to Speaker John Boehner asking him to support inclusion of the Senate language in the final transportation bill.

Richard Lugar ran a short-lived campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996. His campaign didn't come to much and is mostly forgotten.

Still, I voted for him in the Washington State GOP primary that year because I believed then, and still do, that Lugar is an exceptional public servant dedicated to the common good. The man has more knowledge about critical issues such as energy, agriculture, and defense than purist ideologues could ever hope to acquire in 10 lifetimes.

With Lugar facing forced retirement, and other mainstream lawmakers like Olympia Snowe heading for the exits, the Senate seems to be a smaller place, a shadow of what was once known as the world's greatest deliberative body.

If you live in or were visiting the Chicago area on Friday, you might have seen the Heartland Institute's billboards featuring mug shots of convicted Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, mass murderer Charles Manson, or former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro saying, "I believe in Global Warming. Do you?"

The syllogism is obvious: if psychotic madmen accept climate change science, therefore accepting climate change science makes you a psychotic madman.

Heartland denied its intent was to implant such an inflammatory notion into people's heads. The billboards' purpose, Heartland said, was to get across its message that "the people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society."

Out there on what Heartland calls the radical fringe are marginal types such as Pope Benedict XVI, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama. Also, Heartland's definition of the fringe includes such sketchy outfits as NASA, the American Physical Society, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, and the national science academies of the U.S., Canada,, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa.

Every so often, usually at this time of year after citizens have finished sweating over their tax returns, there's a call for junking the tax code and making it simple enough to fit a tax return onto a postcard--which assumes the Postal Service can survive its current existential crisis and continue delivering postcards.

Earlier in the Republican presidential race, Rick Perry took to whipping postcards out of his suit pocket to make the point. In the energy world, there has been similar talk of doing way with all the credits, exemptions, adjustments, exclusions, and deductions energy companies take, cutting corporate rates, and letting the various energy technologies fight for market share on a playing field that is less distorted by tax considerations.

Tax simplification, whether a big bang that scrubs down the whole tax code or focuses only on the energy chapters, would be hard. Not just because lobbyists for this or that interest would swarm congressional offices like angry wasps, but the public itself is not of one mind on the issue. Individuals who would agree that IRS forms would put the patience of Job to the test--subtract line 44 from line 43, subtract line 47 from line 46, multiply line 48 by 15%--might not agree about throwing out energy tax preferences.