Hal Rogers: “I would appreciate the gentleman responding and respecting my time, as I respected his. Of course, I did not say that. I…”

“I would appreciate the gentleman responding and respecting my time, as I respected his. Of course, I did not say that. I would never say something like that. I did not say that it would be minimum wage employees operating expensive equipment. Of course you have to have experts to operate the new CAT scan-type x-ray machines that we are bringing on-line now and paying for in our bills. If you take a tour of the Rome airport, for example, as the ranking member and I did just a while back, and saw the expensive, highly-paid classified workers out of sight beneath the airport searching all baggage, including searched baggage, you know that it must be done by an expert. Of course it must be. I am just saying for the routine things, looking in purses, opening up a briefcase looking for something, you do not have to have a highly paid person doing that. But you do, of course, have to have the highly paid Federal workers that are there with security clearances to receive information from our security agencies to check the person, to see if they are on the watch list, to see if they have been involved in problems overseas somewhere, or here. That is the person that needs to be the expert, and that is what I would advocate that we do. Now, the system as it now is run by the airlines, they have been in the past needing to get by on the cheap, and they have. And no one defends the present system, certainly not me. I have been probably one of the most critical of it there is.”