FORCEDOWN

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
force-down 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 avia-tion. 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 dol-lars 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 the 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 min-utes 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 AU PA'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 under-mining the rights of pilots by
requiring reasonable suspicion and adding innocent owner provisions.. .1
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 force-down 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
with-out an appeal for help, hundreds of pilots saw the issue on AU PA'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.

Phil Boyer

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett