Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise today in strong support of my legislation, H.R. 5056, the Airport Perimeter and Access Control Security Act. I want to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry) for his hard work in the Committee on Homeland Security where we are colleagues, as well as his work trying to keep our Nation's security and our airport security at its highest level. Mr. Speaker, this bill was a long time coming. Since I was first elected to Congress in 2010, I have worked hard to secure our Nation's airports. The last case I had when I was a district attorney before entering Congress was the case of a young 16-year-old who had secreted himself on a commercial airliner penetrating the perimeter of the Charlotte- Douglas International Airport and, undetected, stowed himself away in the wheel well. Tragically, he went from North Carolina, and his body was found in Massachusetts in the district I represented. As we investigated the cause of that death, we found out what the circumstances were that he had penetrated all the security. In fact, I sent my investigators down from Massachusetts to look at that. Even knowing that this had occurred, there was no record, videowise or otherwise, of what he had done. So even looking backwards, we couldn't even find out where the security was breached until we made the conclusions at the end of our investigation and looked at the perimeter of that airport and how vulnerable that was.…”