DeMint claims bipartisanship on bill that benefits one dead person
Senator Jim DeMint, who can't bring himself to do anything about transpo infrastructure in SC, still managed to whore himself out to the Evil Pelosi on an airline safety bill:
Quick. Name a legislative issue on which U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint agrees with the House Democratic leadership, i.e., Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
It's OK. We would have had a tough time, too, until South Carolina's junior Republican senator sent out a news release last week headlined, "DeMint Praises U.S. House for Moving to Pass FAA Extension with Essential Safety Provisions."
DeMint has been a member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee since his election in 2006, and joined the Aviation Safety subcommittee in April of last year, not long after the tragic crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407 outside Buffalo, N.Y., killed 51 people, including Lorin Maurer of Moore, S.C. First up on the aviation subcommittee's agenda was the need for a bill extending the life of the Federal Aviation Administration by three years, so DeMint drafted a reauthorization with a slew of new safety provisions with an extremely diverse group of co-sponsors - including Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), author of the since-discarded liberal health care "public option" that DeMint was so vehemently criticizing at the same time.
On its way through Congress, the aviation bill became saddled with a number of other provisions unrelated to safety, most notably, a rule change that would have made union organizing easier for FedEx employees. The bill began to bog down, and congressional leaders began considering scrapping the safety improvements altogether, and simply reauthorizing the FAA for an extra year while they continued negotiating.
Last week, the House leaders struck a compromise in the conference committee: they would agree to the temporary FAA extension and continue working on the more controversial reforms, but go ahead and adopt the safety provisions. Among other changes, the extension will mandate the FAA create stricter rules to prevent pilot fatigue and dramatically increase the amount of flight time required of commercial pilots. The bill will also create new tracking methods for pilot-error records, all needs identified in the Buffalo crash investigations and championed by the victims' families.
The increase in gridlock in Washington is an objective, demonstrable reality. Each party's use of arcane procedural techniques to inflict its will on its opponents is reaching an untenable high, and DeMint has often been a very visible part of this problem. The triumph of the FAA regulations, and his rare but apparently genuine praise for House Democrats, is a welcome reminder that things don't have to be this way.
"Disagreements make for headlines," DeMint spokesman Wesley Denton told us this week. "Agreements usually don't, but it doesn't mean we cannot agree on every single issue all the time. This is the way it should work on safety issues."
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