greentips

Ahhh, but they're slowly working their way toward that goal. They've pulled a couple of real boners recently that got the attention of very influential congressmen. They backed off on one NPRM where they actually went through the motions and published a proposed regulation in the Federal Register. It garnered the most comments of any proposed regulation by any federal agency ever in the history of the docket system. Congress told them that if they persisted, they would introduce a resolution of disapproval in response to the NPRM precluding them from every attempting to issue such a rule. They backed down.

More recently, due to yet another abuse of the SSI/Security Directive process, the TSA funding bill, HR 2200 was amended to prohibit the use of SSI and security directives based on SSI for longer than 180 days unless they entered the formal rule making process and published an NPRM.

This amendment passed by a healthy margin and is now part of the bill sent to the Senate. While there were many democrats crossing over to vote for the amendment, I think co-sponsored by a democrat, all of the Nays on the role call were democrats. Nonetheless, it did pass and awaits its fate in the Senate.

I would encourage all to write their senators when the senate version comes up to make darn sure that this clause isn't negotiated out in the conference committee.

That way, the TSA can keep its precious horsepee SDs if they are really real, but they have to justify them if they want to keep them. The most they can do this kind of abuse is 6 months without formal rule making.

PS. I learned something on the trail in the back country of the high rockies. 3 day old horse pee smells much worse than 3 day old horse manure, and the stuff emanating from the TSA is much older than 3 days.
-----
Next travel requirement: All cabin passengers must take bean-o in front of a security checkpoint to insure passengers don't band together to create a fuel-air explosive with body gasses.