[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 15]
[Senate]
[Pages 20779-20780]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                           AVIATION SECURITY

  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, it is Thursday of almost the fifth or sixth 
week since September 11. We still have not passed aviation security in 
the U.S. Congress. I cannot impress upon my colleagues enough how much 
I hear from aviation personnel, from law enforcement personnel, and 
from people throughout our country, how we are beginning to press the 
line of irresponsibility in our not having moved on this.
  There is a reason our economy is still hurting. There are many 
reasons. None of them are going to be solved by any one single 
component. We understand that. We began September with a huge overhang 
in the telecommunications industry. All of us knew the stocks in the 
marketplace were significantly overvalued. There was almost a decline 
taking place prior to September 11. But

[[Page 20780]]

we have a responsibility to do everything in our power to begin to turn 
the economy around and to protect a lot of our citizens who are 
beginning to feel a lot of economic pain.
  One of the principal ways we can do that is in the stimulus package 
itself, as well as in passing aviation security.
  I have heard some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in 
the House suggest publicly that one of the reasons they don't want to 
pass the aviation federalization is because some of these folks may be 
in a union; they may join a union. Are we really so far away already 
from the events of September 11 that people around here have forgotten 
that the firemen and the police officers and a lot of the medical 
technicians and other folks who lost their lives on September 11 were 
members of a union?
  We do an extraordinary insult to that event and to what has happened 
since by having ideology and politics suddenly come back to prevent us 
from doing something that almost every person in the industry accepts 
is the best way to provide the highest level of security to the 
American people.
  I respectfully suggest the best way we can provide a stimulus to this 
country is not by turning around and putting $1.4 billion into the 
coffers of IBM and billions more dollars into the coffers of a whole 
host of energy companies and other large corporations--not because they 
are bad, not because we think they don't deserve help in some way or 
another, they have received a lot of it, but because a stimulus package 
is supposed to do the most you can not to reward past investments or 
make up for past mistakes but put money, cash, into the hands of 
Americans now, to create jobs now in order to turn the economy around.
  What we have staring us in the face is a whole set of requirements to 
make our post offices more secure, to make our trains more secure, to 
make our airlines more secure, to make countless of numbers of 
components of our health system more capable of responding to the 
potential of disease. When all of these security needs are staring us 
in our face, there ought to be a stimulus package that is security-
oriented, that has some spending in it that puts people to work now at 
those tasks we know we have to embrace.
  To see this package that came out of the House of Representatives 
with its extraordinary amount of giveaway, I find it an insult to the 
purpose of the Congress, to the weight of this moment of history, and 
to the obligation that we all have to bring security to our country and 
jobs to our citizens.
  I hope we are going to do a better job in the course of the next 
weeks.
  I yield the floor.

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