While We're At It, Contract Out DeLay

By: Cragg Hines

The incomprehensible wrangling that has delayed enactment of an airport security bill has gone from being just annoyingly partisan, which was bad enough, to insanely ideological, which is obscene.

Almost two months after the terrorism of Sept. 11, the feeble, lowest-bidder system of passenger and carry-on inspection remains in place. Part of the system was criminally inept (there was at least one indictment, for chrissakes, and a $1 million-plus fine) before the attacks. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said one major contractor, Argenbright Security, was guilty of "an astonishing pattern of crimes that potentially jeopardized public safety".

A month after the attacks, Ashcroft, announcing what amounted to a parole violation by Argenbright, said the company "continues to violate the law".

Judging by personal experience and news reports of astounding security lapses, the system has improved little, if any. I have more confidence that my entire order at a drive-through McDonald's will be in the bag than that some screeners still on the job could tell a 1,600-watt Conair from a 9 mm Glock as it passed through their checkpoint - or would notice or bother to check.

As if to help make the point, screeners at Chicago's O'Hare over the weekend cleared a man with seven knives (in addition to the two he admitted carrying and gave up), a stun gun and a can of pepper spray. "A failure of dramatic proportions", said Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, point man in an administration inexplicably wedded to the failed rent-a-goof system.

On Oct. 11, the Senate unanimously passed a bill that would have replaced the current lackadaisical screening system with a force of federal agents. Lest the 100-0 vote fail to impress, remember that such a tally requires a meeting of some highly divergent minds: Jesse Helms and Teddy Kennedy, Phil Gramm and Paul Wellstone, Strom Thurmond and Barbara Boxer.

The Senate response was a demonstration of the bipartisanship that President Bush has preached, before and after Sept. 11, but practiced only in a limited, grudging fashion.

The Senate action looked too good to be true - and was.

House Republicans - mesmerized by the Abbott and Costello of the legislative world, Majority Leader Dick Armey of Lewisville, and Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Sugar Land - laid out their hand early. They opposed the Senate measure because it would create a 28,000-person new federal work force that could be unionized.

"It's all about union membership in a union that imposes compulsory dues that fund their [Democratic] campaigns", Armey said at one point. When that came across as a touch crass, even by Armey's standard of mindlessness, he and DeLay started backing and filling, talking about tarmac security and presidential prerogatives and (you have to love this) the supposedly admirable European system.

What Armey, DeLay and their security company chums (indicted and unindicted alike) don't want, of course, are European pay scales, health insurance, vacation schedules and work rules. When they invoke the supposedly "private" Israeli system, recall that only about 10 percent of that force is really nongovernmental and that most of even that small slice has military training.

DeLay and Armey bottled up the Senate bill until they could beat up and, in essence, bribe (principally with targeted district aid deals) just enough House Republicans. They laid down their cudgels last week and beat the Senate proposal 214-218.

Defeat of the Senate plan and subsequent adoption of a weaker House Republican substitute, that allows the greedy security companies to remain at the aeronautical trough, was an unmerited vote of confidence in the status quo. The House bill, as Rep. Ken Bentsen, D-Houston, noted, "refuses to provide the public with what they need: full law enforcement protection at airports".

Perhaps the most unfathomable piece of this show is the White House's acquiescence in DeLay's game-playing. Even in the midst of war, the president and his political handlers have time to fixate on the Republican right. It is a sad permutation on the political dictum to "dance with the girl that brung you".

DeLay found time to take umbrage that some critics of his friends-of-Argenbright approach noted DeLay would never think of contracting out the Capitol Police. "There is no credible comparison between the dangers, duties and responsibilities shouldered by Capitol Police officers...", DeLay said. Try telling that, Tom, to the families of passengers on American Airlines flights 11 and 77 or United Airlines flights 93 and 175.

If House Republicans really have faith in any part of the failed airport security system, they must be among the few people on the planet still harboring such a dangerous delusion. But that, of course, is one of DeLay's specialties.