He has my full support, because John will bring vision, new ideas, and actually juice to the excellent Transportation team President Obama is assembling.

But it is a sad day for Maryland if we--as we lose him to be our Secretary of Transportation.

Keep in mind, in Baltimore, is a city where we had the Dawson murders where seven people, a family of seven, were incinerated in their home because they simply wanted to cooperate with the police.

It's extremely pervasive in Maryland and in Baltimore. It's estimated that, in violent offenses, sometimes as much as 90 to 100 percent of the cases involve some type of witness intimidation.

And the fact is that in Baltimore, a person could be standing at a bus stop. There could be 20 people, somebody could come up, kill that -- kill one of the people. Everybody knows who did it. And nobody will tell. Nobody.

We have pretty much been guaranteed that it will pass out of the judiciary committee.

What my message is, is that we're going to do everything in our power to help them and protect them.

It is so very important that we have transparency.

I believe that she saved a lot of lives.

I think it's extremely important that we do everything in our power to protect whistleblowers.

We are very hopeful--we are confident that we will get it out of the House again.

I think we feel it imperative to move forward and strengthen whistleblower protections.

Transparency is something that we need too in our government.

I want to thank the chairman for taking this up as one of the first orders of business.

I will look at your testimony.

We are going to take their statements at face value and in good faith, and we really hope that this time around we can move forward.

I just want to come and thank all of you for your testimony today, but for also having stood up as whistleblowers and put yourselves on the line.

I think you've given the right definition of what is meant by 'normalization of relations.'