It is disappointing to read these comments. Now, I sometimes post without reading the article, but in those cases at least I know what the article is about.
Neither Obama nor LaHood are claiming the right to ignore the law (or what will become the law when the Senate passes the House-approved bill and the President signs it). This is not a line-item veto. LaHood is merely invoking a clause *that was put into the bill by the Republican House* that allows the Secretary of Transportation to waive the prohibition on spending money on rural airports if it would imperil access to transportation or something like that, and LaHood will invoke the clause immediately upon the bill becoming law. Now, one can argue that LaHood hasn’t really shown that there won’t be access to rural transportation without spending that money, and perhaps we can get a court to step in and rule that LaHood hasn’t met the conditions to invoke the clause (although I doubt we’d win a court case, since the Transportation Secretary would be afforded great discretion by the courts), but that is something completely different from accusing the Obama Administration of unilaterally striking down a legal provision. Obama has done that before (e.g., by refusing to enforce DOMA), but in this case he would be acting pursuant to authority granted by the statute).
In any event, this $16 million is a trivialmissue compared to a clause of vital importance that I believe the GOP included in the FAA bill and which Obama wouldn’t be able to waive: the provisionnstriking down the regulation that would allow airline-worker unions to be created merely by the union obtaining a majority vote among workers who voted instead of a majority of all workers. That’s the real reason why the Democrat Senate refused to pass the House bill before; the fact that they’ll pass it now with the fig leaf of LaHood waiving the prohibition on spending $16 million onnrural airports makes me believe that the Democrats were afraid of getting tbe blame for the shutdown and capitulated.
This is pure circumventing the law. That part of the bill was put in to keep travelers flying and not to keep Gubermint Workers painting bathrooms.