You might assume that the job of protecting your interests as pilots in Washington, D.C., is nothing like flying. Yet the AOPA Legislative Action staff on the ground in Washington sometimes confronts the same situation they might find in the air — an emergency. AOPA advocates in Washington cope with detail after detail to resolve a crisis, encountering new problems along the way — just as we do behind the yoke. Most AOPA members appreciate the end result, but they don't see the behind-the-scenes work that gets it done, or all the twists and turns in the legislative process that we face.
Case in point: a recent move in Congress to give law enforcement officers broader powers to order any aircraft flying near the U.S. border to land as part of drug interdiction efforts. You read about the proposal in last month's "AOPA Action." This month, "Action" includes the good news that Congress has dropped the plan for now. But what happened in between?
Earlier this year, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) included this recurring forcedown idea in an antidrug measure, H.R.3858, but Congress has not yet acted on that bill.
But like an in-flight emergency, the forcedown proposal reared its head where we didn't expect it — the controversial tobacco bill that the Senate debated in June.
How did the Senate find a connection between smoking and general aviation? As it happens, Senate rules don't require any logical link between a bill and an amendment to it. On June 5, Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.) offered a broad antidrug amendment to the tobacco bill, which included the forcedown powers for law enforcement officers. Coverdell argued that as the Senate wages war on tobacco, it should also consider illegal substances.
Without warning, we faced a major threat on the Senate floor in a bill that previously had nothing to do with aviation. This was an emergency.
Coverdell's amendment would have allowed law officers to randomly order any aircraft near the border to land, without reasonable suspicion. It could have required aircraft owners whose aircraft were seized to spend thousands of dollars to recover their property — even if they were innocent of criminal wrongdoing. It imposed a stiff prison sentence for failing to comply with an order to land. And it could obviously bring a threat to safety. While supportive of efforts to stop drug smuggling, at the Pilot Town Meetings that I held in Southern California in May, two-thirds of the pilots expressed their opposition to this proposal.
AOPA turned to language that we had developed in the past, requiring reasonable suspicion of unlawful activity involving an aircraft before law officers could order it to land, and added "innocent owner" provisions giving an innocent aircraft owner expedited procedures to recover a seized aircraft.
AOPA Legislative Action staff called Coverdell's office soon after he offered his amendment on Friday, June 5. We also placed a call to Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), AOPA 238902 (see " Pilots," p. 184). Inhofe agreed immediately to help with this issue, and he personally contacted Coverdell. By the following Monday, June 8, Coverdell had agreed to make the changes we sought.
However, as with any emergency, all things that can go wrong seemed to happen at once. The next day, the U.S. Coast Guard told Coverdell that it opposed AOPA's changes. AOPA scrambled to get documents to Coverdell's office to prove that the Coast Guard's objections were unwarranted. Coverdell was moved to modify his amendment by adding our language, but shortly thereafter a parliamentary error stopped the changes from getting written into the amendment. Twenty minutes later, the Senate adopted Coverdell's amendment — without our changes.
The only action left was to ask Coverdell to put himself on record as supporting our changes to his amendment, which would help when the Senate and House meet in conference to write a compromise between their versions.
AOPA worked out the details with senators Coverdell and Inhofe, and the two senators read their precise intentions into the Congressional Record.
Using this parliamentary technique to influence the drafting or interpretation of legislation, Coverdell said that he had intended to change the bill to satisfy AOPA's concerns and pledged to seek to either make the changes or delete the forcedown provision altogether.
"I understand that we can achieve the goal of fighting drug smuggling without jeopardizing safety or undermining the rights of pilots by requiring reasonable suspicion and adding innocent owner provisions ... I will work to make the necessary changes to resolve these problems," stated Coverdell.
Fate came to our aid when the tobacco bill was defeated in the Senate. That made following up on the thorny forcedown issue unnecessary — until it comes up in another bill.
A good legislative program requires expertise in the issues, constant vigilance to catch anything that gets slipped into legislation, a network of allies to call on, and a membership willing to support these efforts when the time comes. The tobacco bill died before we needed to call on you, as members, to hammer Washington with your letters and phone calls. Even without an appeal for help, hundreds of pilots saw the issue on AOPA's Web site and contacted Sen. Coverdell and others, and it made a difference.
We sweated the details this time, and we succeeded. But I won't hesitate to ask for your help when it's needed — because in my experience, AOPA members always respond with vigor to such calls for action, and they really do get results. After all, we are pilots. When there's an emergency, I can't think of anyone better qualified to handle it.
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