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U.S. Rep. Shuster has some tough choices to make

5 min read

So U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster is sleeping with the woman who lobbies him on behalf of her employer, the airline industry. Should we care?

Rep. Shuster seems to think not. He issued a terse no comment, none-of-your-business statement, when the subject of the relationship was broached by the Capital Hill daily, POLITICO.

Actually, what Shuster told POLITICO was this: “Ms. (Shelley) Rubino and I have a private and personal relationship, and out of respect for her and my family that is all I will say about that.”

He said Rubino, the girlfriend, ceased lobbying him in July 2014.

The congressman, sent to Washington with the help of voters in Fayette, Washington and Greene counties, is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He is one of the three or four most important people in Congress when it comes to the airline industry.

The committee he’s in charge of sets the legislative parameters for the industry. Recently, the committee has been examining the nation’s air traffic control system, no small matter.

Shuster has been highly critical of that system, despite a safety record that is little short of astounding: a few years ago an MIT statistician came up with the astonishing fact that you would have to fly every day for the next 63,000 years before you were due for injury or death in a commercial plane crash.

Consider this: three billion people flew on U.S. airlines between 2007 and 2011. In all that time, only 50 people died, and they died in the same turboprop crash.

So why is Shuster upset? He concedes the airways are safe, but says the system itself is increasingly antiquated. At a committee hearing in March, he complained that billions of dollars have been spent over several decades on an upgraded air traffic control system with not much to show for it.

“We are nowhere near where we need to be,” he told the committee

At issue is passenger convenience. “… Delays are up at 13 of our 20 largest” airports, the congressman said. He pointed out that domestic commercial flights take longer today than they did in 1973, which is almost as mind-bending as the MIT professor’s stat about that 63,000- year safety window.

Things are getting so bad, according to Rep. Shuster, that someday soon every day at the airport “will seem like Thanksgiving eve,” a bit of hyperbole that helps even non-flyers understand the mess that awaits the flying public, not in the skies but on the ground.

The problem is not the air traffic controllers, who got kicked to the curb (I’m now mixing transportation metaphors) by President Reagan in the early eighties. The airlines are not to be blamed either.

The problem lies with the government agency in charge of air safety, the Federal Aviation Administration. The congressman, flashing his 2015 Republican bonifides, views the FAA as “a vast government bureaucracy” incapable of determining “risks”, pursuing “the most cost-efficient investments,” or managing “people to produce results.”

In short, Rep. Shuster said, the FAA is not a business. Well, he actually used the words “normal business” — not “a normal business” like Verizon, which, he reminded the committee, has “upgraded its wireless network four times” while the FAA “hasn’t gotten any better.”

The congressman concluded on a high note — on a note that is impossible to dispute. This country, he said, can’t settle for our grandfather’s air traffic control system. It must have “the safest, most cost-efficient, most technology advanced” air traffic control “system in the world.”

Sadly, Rep. Shuster reiterated, we will “never get there on our current path.”

Now, the congressman may be right about all of this. Modernization may require a brand new model — a method of operation that looks and does things the way a private enterprise looks and does things. After all, private enterprise brought us the health insurance industry; our national pride and joy, the big box-store industry; our national fast-food joints.

I’m being facetious, of course. Seriously, the congressman may be correct. But how can we non-experts know if he’s being truthful or merely repeating the pro-industry pillow talk of his pro-industry girlfriend (who, by the way, gets paid a pretty penny — $460,000 a year -representing the airline industry, as a vice president of Airlines for America).

The thing is, we can’t know. No matter how vigorously or sincerely Rep. Shuster dismisses the notion of a romantic quid pro quo, his constituents can never know — not for sure. And that’s the problem, and it’s a problem not just for Shuster and those who sent him to Washington, but for the integrity and reputation of Congress, and ultimately for the country and its people.

We Americans love a good romance. It warms the heart. It also gets our gossip juices flowing.

Being in love can be hard. Being is love and being in politics may be impossible. For a congressman whose heart’s aflutter for a lobbyist, it can be the best of times, and the worst.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books – Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.

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