Political Quotes

“I thank the majority leader for making this UC request. I have been in this body since early 2009. This issue which we are debating about--slots at DCA--is a perennial one. People feel very strongly on both sides. There has never been a time since I have been in the Senate that there was not either a bipartisan agreement to resolve this issue before it came to the floor or a debate on the floor which resulted in a vote. Sometimes it is part of the States--Virginia and Maryland--that don't want additional slots. We have been successful. Sometimes we have not. But each and every time, there has been a vote. As a matter of fact, if we look over at the proceedings on this bill, in the House, managers of those bills thought they had some sense of what should be included in or not included in, in a slot debate. But the House of Representatives actually had a vote, and to the surprise of the managers of the bill, slots were completely eliminated from that piece of legislation. I am not going to sit here and rehash all of the statistics. What is clear, though, is that the single busiest runway in the United States of America is not at DFW; it is not in New York; it is not in Seattle; it is not in Atlanta; it is at National Airport--an airport that was originally constructed for 15 million passengers, with 3 runways to allow some distribution of those flights.…”