Jay Inslee: “this is day 42 after the attack of September 11, and still this Chamber has not had one single solitary itty-bitty vote…”

“this is day 42 after the attack of September 11, and still this Chamber has not had one single solitary itty-bitty vote to do a darn thing about airline safety. It is incredible to me that tomorrow we will be voting on these giant handouts, corporate tax breaks; and we have done absolutely nothing, Mr. Speaker, for the traveling public of this country to make airlines safer. Let me tell you why I feel so strongly about this. Thursday I was flying up to New York, and the fellow next to me was going through security. And we have got National Guardsmen standing there, and they are doing the great duty standing there. And our screeners are I think trying to do a little better job. The guy next to me had a nail clipper, and the screening people said, ``Sir, you can't have that.'' They took the nail clipper and ripped off the little pointed deal to take the nail clipper away from him. That is great, that we are taking nail clippers away from people. But they did not do anything about the guy's bag that he checked in that could have had 40 pounds of C-4 high explosives in it, that went right into the belly of the airplane I was getting on, with another 150 people getting on, who thought, who thought the bags are checked for explosives in this country. In fact, they are not, because, Mr. Speaker, the sad fact is that 90 percent probably-plus of the bags that go into our airplanes go straight into the belly of the airplane, and they are not checked for anything.…”