John Rice Carter: “The simple fact is this amendment is unnecessary and harmful to national security, in my opinion. Now, am I happy with…”

“The simple fact is this amendment is unnecessary and harmful to national security, in my opinion. Now, am I happy with TSA? No. I have criticism of TSA also. Most people who travel have some criticism of TSA. But zeroing out TSA and leaving our airports unsecured is not the solution to the problem. If the gentleman's argument is that we're being fiscally responsible to do away with the TSA part of this budget, I would argue the contrary. This bill, quite frankly, has made cuts, and, in fact, for 4 years now we have reduced spending in this bill. That's not a good argument. It's easy to get mad at somebody that interferes with your life every time you travel, especially when you travel every week, but the reality is, this would be a mistake to national security. This would be a mistake to our country. And even though we have criticism of TSA, our job is to fix TSA, not abolish TSA. And I know there's plenty of folks that think that abolishing it is a good idea, but, quite honestly, it would be a real tragedy to leave our airports undefended. We need to make them better. And I think one of the things we're doing is the oversight that we've provided in this bill so that we can take a hard look at DHS across the board and come up with solutions where things need to be fixed; and, of course, if TSA's on the radar screen, they ought to be fixed. But I think this is a mistake. I think it's bad policy.…”