Posted on 08/04/2011 3:56:34 PM PDT by tobyhill
After all the pleading and partisan accusations over funding the Federal Aviation Administration, Democratic lawmakers and Obama officials found the answer to ending a two-week shutdown of the agency literally right under their noses.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is sending a letter Thursday, saying a bill that the GOP-led House passed extending the FAA's operating authority through mid-September gives him the power to waive a provision Democrats opposed that cuts $16.5 million in air service subsides to rural communities.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
The congress is defunct!
And may end up dissolved if they don’t pull their heads out. Don’t they know any history?
The stupid party allows an unelected bureaucrat to screw the country... again.
I wish ill will on all socialist politicians.
Right. Give a Democrat a loophole, he’ll take it.
We don’t like what the House says, so we’ll just ignore it.
Now why don’t you little people make yourselves useful and pay your taxes? Your government is broke. :)
/sarc(?)
Lost a toe, but saved the leg.
It is disappointing to read these comments. Now, I sometimes post without reading the article, but in those cases at least I know what the article is about.
Neither Obama nor LaHood are claiming the right to ignore the law (or what will become the law when the Senate passes the House-approved bill and the President signs it). This is not a line-item veto. LaHood is merely invoking a clause *that was put into the bill by the Republican House* that allows the Secretary of Transportation to waive the prohibition on spending money on rural airports if it would imperil access to transportation or something like that, and LaHood will invoke the clause immediately upon the bill becoming law. Now, one can argue that LaHood hasn’t really shown that there won’t be access to rural transportation without spending that money, and perhaps we can get a court to step in and rule that LaHood hasn’t met the conditions to invoke the clause (although I doubt we’d win a court case, since the Transportation Secretary would be afforded great discretion by the courts), but that is something completely different from accusing the Obama Administration of unilaterally striking down a legal provision. Obama has done that before (e.g., by refusing to enforce DOMA), but in this case he would be acting pursuant to authority granted by the statute).
In any event, this $16 million is a trivialmissue compared to a clause of vital importance that I believe the GOP included in the FAA bill and which Obama wouldn’t be able to waive: the provisionnstriking down the regulation that would allow airline-worker unions to be created merely by the union obtaining a majority vote among workers who voted instead of a majority of all workers. That’s the real reason why the Democrat Senate refused to pass the House bill before; the fact that they’ll pass it now with the fig leaf of LaHood waiving the prohibition on spending $16 million onnrural airports makes me believe that the Democrats were afraid of getting tbe blame for the shutdown and capitulated.
Golly gee, FAA has been shut down for the past two weeks? If Bush were still pres that would have been screaming headline news.
This is pure circumventing the law. That part of the bill was put in to keep travelers flying and not to keep Gubermint Workers painting bathrooms.
the governement was not collecting a 7% ticket tax.
in september all this can be resorted.
keep the unions out.
keep the tax cut.
dump the subsidy with the administrator authority.
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