Jeff Denham: “Real quickly, let me just explain what the F4A Denham amendment does. This clarifies the intent of the 1994 FAA bill…”

“Real quickly, let me just explain what the F4A Denham amendment does. This clarifies the intent of the 1994 FAA bill; thus, how it got its name, the F4A. It created one Federal regulatory standard for meal and rest breaks or hours of service for interstate freight and passenger motor carriers. This was originally in the FAA bill of 1994. It also included piece rate. Now, we have passed this issue several times from the House over to the Senate--a very good bipartisan bill--but while we have had great bipartisanship in the past, to get greater bipartisanship, and to work with labor, we actually took out the piece rate issue. Now, this bill only deals with meal and rest--the same as that piece of it that was in 1994 where Congress, where this body actually reported out saying: ``State economic regulation of motor carrier operations causes significant inefficiencies, increased costs, reduction of competition, inhibition of innovation and technology, and curtails the expansion of markets.'' This is about interstate commerce, making sure that you can drive a truck transporting goods from one State to another without having challenges going from a patchwork of States across the entire country. We want these professional drivers to be safe, meaning if you get tired, take a break. What we don't want to do is say, at 2 hours, you need to pull over immediately--on the bridge, on the highway, wherever you are at, creating an unsafe condition. Stop at the rest stop.…”