Jay Inslee: “The Senate passed a strong version requiring the Federal Government to assume responsibility for security of Americans…”

“The Senate passed a strong version requiring the Federal Government to assume responsibility for security of Americans in the air. It was 100 to zero. The bill came over to the House. It languished here for weeks and weeks and weeks after September 11. The Republican leadership refused to bring it up, essentially because they could not pass it. They finally brought it up last week and a very, very narrow margin passed a different version that had this giant hole in it, more Swiss cheese than anything; and now it goes to a conference committee where members of the House and Senate will meet to try to reconcile this to come up with a bill. We are just very hopeful that now that America has found out about this bill and people have found out, as Siskel & Ebert would say, it is two thumbs down for America on its failure to federalize this responsibility, that the conferees will, in fact, adopt the Senate version and have the Federal Government have Uncle Sam take over this system like they should have done 10 years ago to prevent guns, knives, sticks, bottles and everything else getting through this poor system.”