Political Quotes

“Reserving the right to object, my colleague is right-- he has been to the floor to talk about this issue, and I don't think, though, that he has all the facts right. We just had a major transportation hearing in the Commerce Committee before we left for the holiday recess, and we heard from airline executives--some who had implemented their own vaccines, some who had implemented other mandates and systems on their own, and others who basically responded to the Federal Government's desire to say that passengers would be required to wear masks. All of them said that this was a big success. All of them said that this, along with the Federal dollars that went into preserving the airlines, allowed us and our economy to recover better than other nations had; basically that when the upswing in transportation got to the point where people felt it was safe to travel, that those mechanisms themselves helped us have an airline sector and industry that could respond so that we literally, by Thanksgiving, were up to 85, 90 percent of where we had been the previous year. So my colleague, I think, would like us to predetermine today exactly everything we are going to do on this issue; that we would prohibit the President, the Department of Transportation, Amtrak, and the Transportation Security Administration from making these decisions in the future. Now, I can just tell you, I get up every day and I read the press.…”