Political Quotes

“Mr. President, there are a number of amendments I think will probably not come up, but they should. We talked about this some time ago. The Federal Aviation Administration has come up with a change for their SUB-S nonscheduled carriers that is going to make them comply with certain of the wage and hour--the crew rest requirements. Here is the problem we have. About 95 percent of the passengers who go into-- this is our troops--Afghanistan today are carried by nonscheduled airlines as opposed to military and about 40 percent of the cargo that is going in. Now, the problem we have is, with the 15-hour restriction on crew rest, they are unable to bring them in, leave them there, and then go back to their point of origin--someplace in Germany--without exceeding that 15-hour limitation. The only choice they would have is to leave them in Afghanistan, which they cannot do because that is a war zone. So I want to have a way of working this out. We want to pursue this because the carriers understand what the problem is. These are the nonscheduled carriers. So it is something I think is very significant, and we need to be addressing it. Another issue is, JIEDDO is the group that is the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. They have done great work in their technology in stopping the various technologies over there, the IEDs that have been killing and causing damage to our troops and to our allies. The problem we have is it is set up just for Iraq and Afghanistan.…”