Airport and Airway Extension Act of 2012

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. I thank the gentleman from Illinois. This compromise only reminds me of how much I regret that he has decided to retire. He was such a valuable chair of our subcommittee and member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. I can only wish him all the good fortune his extraordinarily productive years in the Congress have earned him.

But I thank both sides of the aisle for this short-term extension, short-term, I am assured, to wrap up some details. This is a bill that is really a great deal more bipartisan than it would appear. Yes, there were some tough items, as in any piece of major legislation.

I do regret the major reason for the standoff. This bill, it seems to me, could have been before us long ago but for at least one provision which could have been settled, and that was the provision in the bill that would have insisted that no-shows be counted in labor elections, the no-shows be counted as for one side or the other. And in this case, they would have been counted as a ``no'' vote against joining the union.

You know, you could argue just the opposite, that if you really were against the union, you're the ones who show up. So it seems to me that was a thumb on the scale, but you don't know how it would come out. And some kind of compromise has been reached on that. I will have to wait on that compromise. But I'm very pleased that we've moved ahead on a compromise because the President had said over and over again he was going to veto the bill if it had that provision in it. So since we knew it was going to be vetoed, it was up to us to get to a compromise much earlier and to get on to other tough issues in the bill. And I recognize that more time is needed on those issues.

One of those issues, by the way, has to do with just how much traffic we are going to tolerate at Reagan Airport, with the idea that if an individual Member from the west coast would prefer the convenience of landing at Reagan, then the whole bill should bend in that way. I ask that we consider----

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Ms. NORTON. So, in winding up the bill, I ask that we keep in mind the fact that a very fragile compromise has been reached to allow the three other airports in this region and the economic assumptions involved to divide up the air traffic as has been allowed.

I also want to say that when we get to these union provisions, do remember that in every society, one of the cardinal tests of whether or not you have a free society is whether there is a right to organize a union.

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