Christopher Shays: “I do not believe that. With all due respect, I do not believe it. I do not believe that the passenger aircraft are…”

“I do not believe that. With all due respect, I do not believe it. I do not believe that the passenger aircraft are dependent on cargo in order to be able to take passengers. I just do not buy it. I at least think, though, that the American people deserve the truth, whatever the truth is. This is a debate we need to have, and frankly it needs to be a debate that is more than 40 minutes. The American people are entitled to the truth, whatever that is. When we started out talking about the baggage on passenger aircraft, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) came in with an amendment in 2002, and he asked me to cosponsor it. He said, We do not check baggage. We check some, but we do not check all of it. I said, You have got to be kidding me. He said, We do not. And we have no time line. So we offered an amendment that said by the end of 2004 we would check, and everyone opposed the amendment because they said we could not check by the end of 2004. They said, we do not have the equipment, we do not have the money, it is too costly and the passenger aircraft would just simply not be able to fly. That is what we were told. That is what the record said. Our amendment passed, and an interesting thing happened. When it came back from the conference committee, instead of the end of 2004 that we would check for baggage, it said the end of 2003. I went up to one of the members and said, How come if we could not do it by the end of 2004, we could do it by the end of 2003?”