KMBZ
The Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. Bill Shuster, discusses in this week’s Republican address the House’s efforts to ease flight delays for Americans due to staffing furloughs as a result of sequester cuts.
“This week, many Americans had their flights delayed or cancelled because of the way in which the Obama administration chose to implement the president’s automatic sequestration cuts. Travelers were fed up, and rightly so,” say Shuster, R-Pa.. “Sequestration is bad policy — the wrong way to reduce the deficit. That’s why House Republicans have voted twice to replace these automatic cuts with smarter ones.”
Congress on Friday passed legislation that would provide a temporary solution to the flight delays that have burdened the country over the past week. But Shuster says lawmakers in Congress should have reached a solution long before it came to this.
“That travelers will soon get relief is good news, but it shouldn’t have taken this long, and you deserve an explanation of what happened,” Shuster says in the address. “From the get-go, the Federal Aviation Administration could have acted on its own to responsibly implement the president’s sequester without inflicting this kind of pain on the public.”
Shuster says that instead of making cuts elsewhere, the FAA imposed “blanket across-the-board furloughs” that caused the extensive delays.
“Why?” he says. “Because there are some in the Obama Administration who thought inflicting pain on the public would give the president more leverage to avoid making necessary spending cuts, and to impose more tax hikes on the American people.”
“This episode is yet another demonstration of why we need to replace the president’s sequester with smarter, more responsible cuts,” Shuster says, criticizing President Obama’s handling of the deficit. “The American people deserve better, and leaders in Washington have an obligation to respect your time and money.”
Read more: http://www.kmbz.com/GOP-Weekly-Address-Rep-Shuster-on-Fixing-the-Fligh/16179051