Tough talk against organized labor today from a rare source — a top Bush Administration official.

Check out the testimony Kip Hawley, assistant Secetary for the Transportation Security Administration (Department of Homeland Security), just gave to a subcommittee of the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee.

There will be a serious negative security impact if the labor provision adopted by the Committee, or the alternative pending amendment, becomes law.  Both proposals would dismantle the innovative human capital authorities given to TSA by the Congress after 9/11 and replace it with a 1970’s-era personnel system that is unsuited to TSA’s real-time security mission. …

When the safety of the public is on the line, taking an old, rejected solution and putting a new cover on it and then making it law without full examination can have alarming unintended consequences in the real world.   In a bill that uses the name of the 9/11 Commission, security must come first …

Today, if a TSO is not making the grade, that individual can be taken off the checkpoint immediately.

Under collective bargaining, that person could be screening passengers for months before the process finally runs its course. …

Taking our TSO’s, who today flex and adjust to meet real-time needs, and force-fitting them into a creaky old system, would have far-reaching negative security consequences.

’70s-era … creaky … old — umistakable language about the pre-9/11 security world.