A day after it was revealed that the airline industry and the Biden Administration have been collaborating "for months" on a potential national 'no-fly list' for unruly passengers, a handful of Republican Senators said they will reject any such list.
Eight GOP lawmakers are urging the Department of Justice to dismiss the idea of a national no-fly list for the most egregious and violent passengers on planes.
In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, the eight senators said that since almost 75 percent of the nearly 6,000 incidents aboard flights last year revolved around the federal mask mandate, it would be unfair to punish them for their beliefs.
"Creating a federal 'no-fly' list for unruly passengers who are skeptical of this mandate would seemingly equate them to terrorists who seek to actively take the lives of Americans and perpetrate attacks on the homeland," the senators wrote, according to the Washington, D.C.-based political publication The Hill. "The (Transportation Security Administration) was created in the wake of 9/11 to protect Americans from future horrific attacks, not to regulate human behavior onboard flights."
Attorney General Garland is seemingly the recipient of a lot of letters on the issue lately. He received a missive from Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian earlier this month asking for the DOJ's help in creating such a list.
But the eight Republican senators - identified by The Hill as Sens. Cynthia Lummis (Wyo.), Mike Lee (Utah), James Lankford (Okla.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Kevin Cramer (N.D.), Ted Cruz (Texas), John Hoeven (N.D.) and Rick Scott (Fla.) - say the decision is not for the DOJ but rather for a Congressional vote.
Creating a no-fly list could violate people's Constitutional rights, the senators wrote.
"If the airlines seek to have such a list created, they would be best served presenting that request before Congress rather than relying on a loose interpretation of a decades-old statute originally written to combat terrorism," they said, referring to the TSA no-fly list for known and suspected terrorists created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
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