Leonard L. Boswell: “First, I thought I would start off by acknowledging the efforts to have open rules and so on and by giving you a little…”

“First, I thought I would start off by acknowledging the efforts to have open rules and so on and by giving you a little praise, but you're doing enough to give yourselves praise, so I guess I won't have to do that today. Madam Speaker, I rise to oppose this rule. I rise to address yet another attack on our Nation's workers and the middle class which have been snuck into the FAA Reauthorization Act. As a senior member of the committee and as a pilot myself, I am appalled that Republicans have chosen to play politics with legislation as important as this--one that ensures our skies are safe and operating at peak performance. In H.R. 658, Republicans march on in their crusade against working Americans and middle class families by targeting union representation elections for hardworking Americans. Under this legislation, Republicans would deny transportation workers and their unions the basic tenets of democracy by ordering an absent vote in a representation election to be counted as a ``no'' vote. By this math, not a single one of us serving in the House today would be here when we compare voting populations in our districts with the percentage of the ``yes'' votes we all mustered. On average, we would have earned about 25 percent of the vote.…”