Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, the approach taken in this legislation to outbound mail only makes common sense. There ought to be parity between outbound mail and inbound mail. Presently, there is absolutely no dispute that customs can search all inbound mail. And they do that. However, despite a number of court decisions, despite the Federal regulations, despite code provisions, postal regulations do not allow the post office to search outbound mail. It makes no sense. If you ship something by FedEx or UPS, if you put it in a car, put it on a ship, fly it in an airplane, even put it in your own pocket and you leave the country, you are liable to search. The only search that is not allowed is if you put it in an envelope and mail it out. Now, this disparity has been addressed, and I will name those decisions. There have been two Supreme Court decisions, Shultz, the Ramsey case. The Ninth Circuit has considered this; the Fifth Circuit has considered this. They have all said that customs has the right to do it. But what happens when they try to do it? Well, the postal service does not allow them to do it. Now, as a result, when the postal service has stopped this, there have been several protests lodged. In fact, the first was that we had testimony in this Congress in 2000 and 2001 that drug dealers were using outbound mail to ship the proceeds of drug sales.”