Power and Control

At Washington’s Reagan National Airport yesterday, President Bush signed into law the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, a fundamentally flawed bill that like the road to hell, started out with the best of intentions. With the “aid” of Congress, we now have an additional bureaucracy of 28,000 more federal employees who can “opt out” after three years. Like anyone is really going to voluntarily get off Uncle Sam’s gravy train – please, give me a break!

President Bush

With the unions getting their greasy, slimy fingers into the mix and their kickback/percentage in the way of mandatory union dues that will in all likelihood be used for political purposes contrary to the wishes of the employees which is a direct violation of the Supreme Court Beck decision, you can bet the Democrats are happier than a pig in slop.

One of the inherent problems that handicaps this bill from the get-go is that while I have no problems with paying an extra $10 or so for a plane ticket, the security should have had federal oversight of a handful of federal employees rather than a work force of 28,000 federalized employees in the areas of passenger and baggage screening.

If you will remember recently, a Nepalese “student” with an expired visa (no surprise, there, huh folks?) made it past initial security screenings with multiple weapons in his bag before being stopped in a hand search of his bag just before boarding a jet at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The fact that the security handler was not a federal employee allowed the company to fire them immediately; as a federal employee, they would be consigned to some sort of professional purgatory until a disciplinary hearing had been held and all appeals exhausted, and with the courts such as they are – that could take years. I don’t know about you, but I can think about better ways to have my money better spent.

Perhaps my friend and colleague Bob Lang who (below in this cartoon) put it when he best illustrated it this way with the following caption which I supplied: “And the Senate (on a 100-0 vote) wants them on the public payroll???”

I may not like it, I think it is bad law, and I think it is unconstitutional in that it is not specifically called for in the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment specifically states that all rights not delegated to the federal government belong to the states. Last I checked, the Constitution has not been amended to allow for the Aviation and Transportation Security Act.

When tragedy strikes, people turn to their leaders for help, and to a point, that’s fine; however, there needs to be a degree of self-reliance as well. However, with people today being too fat, dumb and happy such as they are, they are too quick to turn to Big Brother, thus fulfilling George Orwell’s vision of 1984, even if it almost 20 years behind schedule.

Which goes to show that maybe Orwell was closer to the mark than most people are willing to admit.

Timothy Rollins

• Photo of President Bush courtesy of the Associated Press
• Cartoon courtesy of Bob Lang of The American Partisan
• With files from FOX NEWS Channel
• With files from The Washington Post

Copyright © 2001 by Timothy Rollins.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission