[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 92 (Wednesday, July 7, 2004)]
[House]
[Page H5201]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       DELAYED SECURITY MEASURES

  (Mr. DeFAZIO asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, today the Transportation Safety 
Administration finally announced that they are going to plug a huge, 
gaping loophole in aviation security, 15 months after I first brought 
this issue to their attention.
  While Americans nationwide stand patiently in line and the pilots and 
flight attendants are standing in line, sometimes unnecessarily long 
lines because of an arbitrary cap on the number of screeners by the 
Republican majority, unbeknownst to them, hundreds of thousands of 
people on a daily basis have been filing around security carrying 
whatever they wanted, just flashing an ID at a guard. That is, all the 
vendors who work in the airport, the people who have access to the 
terminal and to the airplanes.
  Finally today, today, after being beat over the head for months, the 
Transportation Security Administration is going to require that those 
people also go through security so that they will not be able to carry 
contraband, weapons, drugs or whatever through, to be smuggled aboard 
airplanes. This will improve security for Americans. It took an awfully 
long time to get action from the Bush administration to fill this 
loophole.

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