(JustPatriots.com)- A month before the country experienced a massive air travel disaster over the holidays, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was urged by a group of Democrat senators to take more aggressive action to force airlines to address increasing customer concerns over flight cancelations, delays, and ticket refunds.
In a November 23 letter, Democrat Senators Maria Cantwell, Ed Markey, and Richard Blumenthal urged Buttigieg to strengthen and expedite new regulations targeting the airline companies’ performance.
Citing the upcoming “busy holiday travel season,” the senators pressed Buttigieg to “move expeditiously to bolster and finalize” the Transportation Department’s planned consumer protection rule “to ensure that travelers receive their rightful compensation for flight cancellations and delays.”
Several months earlier, a bipartisan group of 38 state attorneys general sent a letter to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying that the Transportation Department was ignoring airline consumer complaints.
The attorneys general reminded Pelosi that the Department of Transportation is largely responsible for “addressing violations of airline consumer protection.” But “the agency has thus far failed to respond and to provide appropriate recourse in those cases.”
But Secretary Buttigieg dismissed the concerns.
In September, Buttigieg told “The Late Late Show” host James Corden that he believed that the airline industry’s failures “will get better by the holidays,” claiming his department was “really pressing the airlines to deliver better service.”
Yeah, that didn’t age well, did it?
While holiday travelers endured one of the worst air travel seasons in history, it took Secretary Buttigieg four days to publicly respond to the nightmare, promising on Tuesday, December 27 to hold Southwest Airlines accountable.
Buttigieg’s failures earned him criticism not just from Republicans, but from Democrats as well.
Progressive Democrat strategist Nina Turner, slammed Buttigieg on Twitter, calling him “a prime example of failing up.”
Turner’s old boss, Senator Bernie Sanders suggested in a tweet that Buttigieg was going easy on the greedy CEO of Southwest Airlines.
