[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 17793-17794]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




        SAYING ENOUGH IS ENOUGH REGARDING TSA AIRPORT SCREENING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to announce that I 
introduced some legislation today dealing with the calamity that we 
have found at our airports with TSA. Something has to be done. 
Everybody is fed up. The people are fed up, the pilots are fed up, I am 
fed up.
  I have come to this floor many times over the past many years and 
complained about the terrible foreign policy we have had, the terrible 
monetary policy we have had, the excessive spending and the debt, and 
also the tax policy. But what we are doing and what we are accepting 
and putting up with at the airports is so symbolic of us just not 
standing up and saying enough is enough.
  I know the American people are starting to wake up, but our 
government, those in charge, Congress, as well as the executive branch, 
are doing nothing. Yes, they are talking about maybe backing off and 
allowing the pilots to go through. But can you think how silly the 
whole thing is? The pilot has a gun in the cockpit and he is managing 
this aircraft, which is a missile, and we make him go through this 
groping X-ray exercise, having people feeling their underwear. It is 
absurd, and it is time we wake up.
  The bill I have introduced will take care of this. But we have to 
realize that the real problem is that the American people have been too 
submissive. We have been too submissive. It has been going on for a 
long time. This was to be expected even from the beginning of the TSA. 
And it is deeply flawed. Private property should be protected by 
private individuals, not bureaucrats.
  But the bill that I have introduced will take care of it. It is very 
simple. It is one paragraph long. It removes the immunity from anybody 
in the Federal government that does anything that you or I can't do.
  If you can't grope another person and if you can't X-ray people and 
endanger them with possible X-rays, you can't take nude photographs of 
individuals, why do we allow the government to do it? We would go to 
jail. He would be immediately arrested, if an individual citizen went 
up and did these things, and yet we just sit there and calmly say, oh, 
they are making us safe. And besides, the argument from the executive 
branch is that when you buy a ticket, you have sacrificed your rights 
and it is the duty of the government to make us safe.
  That isn't the case. You never have to sacrifice your rights. The 
duty of the government is to protect our rights, not to use them and do 
what they have been doing to us.

                              {time}  1940

  The pilots, hopefully, will be exempted from this.
  Another suggestion I have that might help us: let's make sure that 
every Member of Congress goes through this. Get the x-ray and make them 
look at the pictures and then go through one of those groping pat-
downs, and then I think there would be a difference. Have everybody in 
the executive branch, anybody--a Cabinet member--make them go through 
it and look at it. Maybe they would pay more attention. But this 
doesn't work. This is not what makes us safer. This is preposterous to 
think that the TSA has made us safer.

[[Page 17794]]

  When you think about it, if you look at what's happened over the past 
10 years, during this last decade, we lost 3,000 on a terrible, 
terrible day for America. But since that time in this last decade we 
have also lost 6,000 of our military personnel going over there and 
trying to rectify this problem. We have lost 400,000 people on our 
government-run highways. We have lost 150,000 individuals from 
homicides.
  So I think there's reason to be concerned, reason to deal with this 
problem. We're not dealing with it the right way. We're doing the wrong 
thing. And groping people at the airport doesn't solve our problems. 
What has solved our problems, basically, has been that they put a good 
lock on the door, and they put a gun inside the cockpit. That's been 
the greatest boon to our safety.
  Safety should be the responsibility of the individual and the private 
property owner. But right now we assume the government's always going 
to take care of us, and we are supposed to sacrifice our liberties. I 
say that is wrong. We are not safer. And we also know there are 
individuals who are making money off this. Michael Chertoff, here's a 
guy that was the head of the TSA, selling the equipment. And the 
equipment is questionable. We don't even know if it works, and it may 
well be dangerous to our health.
  The way I see this, if this doesn't change, I see what has happened 
to the American people is we have accepted the notion that we should be 
treated like cattle. Make us safe, make us secure, put us in barbed 
wire, feed us, fatten us up, and then they'll eat us. And we're a bunch 
of cattle, and we have to wake up and say, We've had it.
  I think this whole idea of an opt-out day is just great. We ought to 
opt out and make the point. Get somebody to watch. And take a camera. 
It's time for the American people to stand up and shrug off the 
shackles of our government at TSA at the airports.

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