Originally Posted by studentff

My understanding is that Hawley has the authority to modify TSA policies and the prohibited items list. (The exception was when Congress (stupidly) explicitly required lighters to be banned, but that has since changed.)

Therefore Hawley is directly and personally responsible for the ill-advised and idiotic banning of an entire state of matter in August 2005 in response to an ill-conceived and impractical concept for a plot.

Hawley is also directly and personally responsible for the current ID-check lunacy going on at airports (looking at IDs with blacklights, harassing individuals with transit stamps in their passports and legit address-change stickers on their driver's licenses because they are "modified") when any non-idiot knows that identity has nothing to do with security. (especially when the whole ID-check/no-fly thing is easily circumvented by anyone with a college-kid's fake ID and an inkjet printer)

Hawley is also directly and personally responsible for the continued implementation of the no-fly list and its harassment of thousands of innocent Americans. I have little doubt that he could unilaterally temporarily suspend the use of the list in order to allow time for real due-process redress methods, and I have in previous posts proposed simple due-process redress methods that would clear an individual from this harassment after the first incident. Yet Americans continue to be repeatedly harassed by this blacklist, and Hawley's TSA refuses to implement such measures and instead throws tens of millions of dollars at "Secure Flight," claiming it is a fix when in reality it is another privacy-invading program that will likely worsen the problem of needless harassment.