It's the opposition party's right -- some may say duty -- to stick a finger in the eye of the sitting governor whenever it gets the chance. That's one explanation for why state Republicans, normally the party of free enterprise and privatization, are largely against Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell's plan to lease the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the highest bidder.

The issue gets an airing this morning in Washington, D.C., where the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's subcommittee on highways and transit will examine the proposal. Mr. Rendell is scheduled to offer testimony.

On a federal level, President Bush is pushing hard for privatization of America's highway assets, and many Republicans and libertarians are in agreement with the reasoning: Shedding highways and their staggering maintenance expenses is a quick way to cut costs and raise up-front cash, and the private sector is a more efficient steward than the government. Indiana's Republican governor helped to get the ball rolling in America by negotiating the $3.8 billion, 75-year lease of the state's toll road.

Pitted against the privatization proponents are outspoken critics such as Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio, a Democrat, and trucking groups, who fear private takeovers will lead to higher turnpike fares. The labor unions that typically staff America's toll roads also are worried about their collective livelihood.

In Pennsylvania, though, the coupling of political bedfellows doesn't fall along such neat party lines.

Mr. Rendell finds himself in agreement with President Bush, at least on this bit of transportation policy, while the state's GOP is teaming with typical adversaries -- labor groups and consumer advocates such as PennPIRG, which believes that selling the turnpike would harm the state's long-term financial health. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are cautioning Mr. Rendell and Pennsylvania's transportation leaders about handing the turnpike to banks or foreign investors.

"If you're talking about the politics of this, it's really strange," said Rep. Rick Geist, R-Altoona, chairman of the House Transportation Committee. He's one of a few Republicans aligned with Mr. Rendell on this issue, and he believes that the leasing of the turnpike to investors -- so-called public-private partnerships, or P3s -- is the future of transportation funding.

Both Mr. Geist and the governor are aligned against the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission itself, which is naturally lobbying hard against any lease that would write the commission out of existence.

"We've got to get past this lobbying effort of the turnpike," Mr. Geist.

Senate Republicans, who control their chamber unlike House Republicans, have been especially vociferous on this issue, offering little help to the governor and questioning the nature of his contract with the New York investment house Morgan Stanley, which studied the proposed turnpike lease and is being paid partly based on how much money the lease will fetch.

"This is a strange cocktail, when you have a divided Legislature and a governor saying Republican things," said Jeff Coleman, a Republican political consultant and head of Churchill Strategies, in Hershey. "This is a twofold issue. Republicans are not interested in helping put Ed Rendell on a national ticket," as some have suggested could occur with the former general chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the Clinton administration. Obstructionism is a time-honored tradition in Harrisburg, especially when a governor is in his second-term, a year or two away from lame-duck status.

But the obstructionism has some philosophical roots, said Mr. Coleman.

Many Republicans, he insisted, favor turnpike privatization in theory. What they object to is not the leasing of the turnpike for 30 years, but what Mr. Rendell intends to do with the billions once he gets his hands on it. The governor is giving "lip service to real reform," Mr. Coleman said, because he plans "to underwrite a failed mass transit system" with the money.

Mr. Rendell hopes to invest the turnpike windfall and use the annual interest to fund public transit and pay for road and bridge upgrades -- steps he can take without raising taxes, something that would seem to put him lockstep on the side of Republicans who historically have opposed most any tax increase.

At the same time, however, Republicans aren't interested in propping up public transit in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia no matter where the money comes from, Mr. Coleman said -- at least not without some assurance that both systems, the Port Authority of Allegheny County and Philadelphia's SEPTA, will become more efficient, trimming under-used routes and what are perceived as overblown budgets.

As is often the case when bedfellows don't quite make sense, money is at the root of the partnerships, said Melissa Theriault, a lobbyist for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, a trucking group that opposes highway privatization.

"You've got a lot of states that are scurrying for fast cash," she said. "And this is a very, very attractive solution to that gap," whether you're a Republican governor or a Democratic one. In New Jersey, for example, Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine wants to lease his highway system and use the money to fuel property tax cuts. And in Texas, where lawmakers might allow private firms to build and run new highways, Republicans are pitted against their GOP brothers.

Maybe Pennsylvania doesn't run counter to the norm so much as there is no norm on this particular issue.

"It's strange everywhere," said Robert Poole, transportation guru for the Reason Foundation, a free-market advocate. He's been studying transportation issues for decades.

"It's a new thing and people don't know how to cope with it," he said. "It's not fundamentally a partisan issue. For some people, it's an ideological issue. For some it's a funding issue." And for the turnpike commission or professional drivers, it's a personal issue.