Political Quotes

“Mr. President, as ranking member of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, I, too, wish to discuss the FAA reauthorization bill and agree with the chairman, Senator Rockefeller, who has just spoken, that we have worked in a bipartisan way on this bill for 4 years. I am glad he mentioned Senator Dorgan, who was the chairman of the subcommittee, who pushed so hard last year for us to come to a conclusion and try to pass a permanent bill. The bill that is before us is the bill that passed last year. There are many good provisions in this bill. It passed unanimously in the Senate, and we were on our way to conference with the House. But the House bill was quite different. We never got to the point of being able to work out the differences. I do think there was one part of the bill, which I will discuss more later, where we worked on a compromise to achieve a goal of easing the perimeter rule at Washington's Reagan Airport. We were able to come to an agreement among the leaders on the committee, but we were not able to get the full agreement of the Senate. That was a gentlemen's agreement, if you will, that we would work on putting that into the conference report, but that never came to pass. The perimeter rule around National Airport has slot restrictions and mileage restrictions on how far a plane can go directly in and out of National Airport.…”