[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 7062-7063]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          FAA REAUTHORIZATION

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, the bill we hope to start legislating on 
after the caucuses today is an important piece of legislation, FAA 
reauthorization.
  Last Thursday, I met in my office with representatives of various 
unions that deal with the airline industry--flight attendants, 
mechanics, and air traffic controllers. They had some opinions as to 
what was going on. An hour or two later, I met with the chief executive 
officers of the major airlines in our country today. They were terribly 
concerned about what goes on. The fuel costs for these airlines is now 
approaching 50 percent of their overall cost. I may be a few cents 
wrong in my illustration, but they said: We can't compete. We pay $1.20 
for a gallon of aviation fuel. In Europe they pay 70 cents. You cannot 
compete because the dollar has become so low in value around the world.
  This is an extremely important bill. If there were ever a time we had 
to work in a bipartisan basis in order to approve legislation necessary 
to give the airline industry a chance to survive, then we must do it on 
this piece of legislation.
  I will work with my Republican counterpart to see if we can see a way 
of each side offering amendments. I do not want to have to fill the so-
called legislative tree. We have to be very careful. This is a tax 
bill. So I will have a conversation with my colleague this morning 
before our caucus to see if we can come up with a way to proceed on 
this legislation. It is very important legislation.
  We have so many other things to do. We have the farm bill that is 
completed, basically, I understand. We are going to have to go to that 
soon because it expires the end of this week. We have the Consumer 
Products Safety Conference. That should be completed hopefully by the 
end of next week. We have the budget, our budget that we have to 
complete. Fortunately, on that, we have a statutory time to work toward 
its conclusion.
  Whether we want it, there is going to have to be a discussion about 
fuel prices, what is going on. That is the No. 1 issue facing America 
today. It is more important now than the housing market, which is so in 
a state of distress.
  So we have much to do in the next few weeks, not the least of which--
the House is going to pass, next week, the supplemental appropriations 
bill dealing with the funding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It 
is no easy venture to complete that because, as you know, there are 
certain things the President wants to have on that bill that he has 
told us, in addition to the funding for the wars.
  We have had a lot of opportunity in recent months to point fingers at 
each other. Hopefully, the next 4 weeks, until the Memorial Day recess, 
we can start pointing fingers to a way to complete some of this 
legislation because it is extremely important we do that. For example, 
we had to file cloture on this bill. I told my leadership team I met 
with this morning, we cannot blame that one on the Republicans because 
the fact is the substitute coming from the Finance Committee and the 
Commerce Committee had not been completed until 10 o'clock last night. 
So realistically we couldn't expect Republicans to start legislating on 
that before they had the piece of legislation themselves. But they have 
had it now since last night. I hope, after we have had our caucuses, we 
can proceed toward completing this legislation in some reasonable 
manner.

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