David Obey: “we have now gone about 1,000 days since the attack on this country on 9/11, and this bill is supposed to deal with our…”

“we have now gone about 1,000 days since the attack on this country on 9/11, and this bill is supposed to deal with our efforts to protect the homeland. I think that to evaluate how good those efforts are, we need to compare the challenges with the resources that we are applying to meet those challenges. And if we do, I think there will be no doubt that we are mistakenly trying to do this job on the cheap. Let me give my colleagues some examples of inadequacies in this appropriations bill. Air cargo. Air cargo is a huge threat to the safety of the flying public. If the public understood what a tiny percentage of cargo that is shipped on passenger planes is actually inspected, they would be shocked. It is a tiny percentage. We ought to do something about that. This bill prevents us from doing that. The gentleman from Florida discussed correctly the need for more in-line explosive detection devices at airports. We wanted to try to do that in the bill; but, again, we are precluded from doing that by the budget ceiling. The chairman of the committee himself has indicated how important that is. Yet we are not going to be able to make any significant advances on that front under this bill.”