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The U.S. Congress — a body not exactly known for its swift feet — raced Friday to complete legislation to help travelers avoid delays at airports.

The House voted 361-41 to approve legislation that the Senate passed without objection late Thursday. The bill gives the Federal Aviation Administration more spending flexibility to cut its budget while avoiding furloughs of air traffic controllers.

President Obama plans to sign the legislation to help quickly end the disruptions tied to thin staffing of air traffic control towers.

Elected officials reacted with extraordinary speed to the growing industry and consumer anger over flight delays, especially in the Northeast. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association says it compiled FAA data showing that from Sunday through Wednesday of this week, air carriers experienced 8,804 flight delays, compared with 2,795 delays in the same Sunday-through-Wednesday period in April 2012.

Compounding Problems

It's never easy to precisely identify the cause of delays because often they result from some combination of weather, staffing levels and operational glitches. For example, delays caused by a thunderstorm can be exacerbated by a shortage of controllers to help get flights back on track after the storm ends. Exactly which of the resulting delays can be attributed to the storm alone or to the staffing levels can be a matter of debate.

But aviation experts say that without question, a big reason for the tripling in delays this week was the reduction in the number of on-duty controllers.

"Obviously, traffic patterns and weather patterns change day to day," said Doug Church, a spokesman for the controllers union. But the surge in delays reflects the reduction in controllers, he said.

"Not only is staffing causing delays in a large part, but also delays due to weather are worsened because of the [lack of] staffing," he said.

Church gave this example: At one point Thursday, O'Hare International Airport in Chicago was accepting 72 planes per hour, down from its normal 114, because of reduced staffing. But the airport was also operating under a cloud cover that prevented controllers from performing visual approaches to the airport.

He says that the delays increased because the control tower did not have enough staff to perform concurrent instrument-landing-system approaches.

Aviation consultant Michael Boyd, head of Boyd Group International, said that delays "absolutely" jumped because of the staffing levels and in fact "the delays were even worse than we know."

That's because flight delays cascade through the system, he said. For example, a flight may get held up in New York, and that delay gets attributed to the staffing troubles. But then that flight arrives late to its destination, causing delays at that airport, yet the subsequent delays won't get linked directly to the furloughs, Boyd said.

Airline Profits Threatened

All of that has left airline executives fuming because they already are struggling to keep their companies solvent, Boyd said. "They were worried they wouldn't make any money this year," he said.

The problem with delays began on Sunday when the FAA started decreasing the ranks of controllers to stay within the reduced budget that took effect March 1. That's the date when congressionally mandated, automatic spending cuts began kicking in under the so-called sequestration process.

The FAA said Congress left it with no choice but to furlough 47,000 workers for up to 11 unpaid days each between now and the fiscal year's end on Sept. 30. Those furloughs included nearly 15,000 flight controllers and other workers needed to keep flights moving on time.

With fewer controllers on duty, the FAA said it had to decrease the number of departures and landings, particularly during peak periods. Those "traffic management" changes led to thousands of flight delays, especially in regions with crowded airspace, like the New York City area.

Doubts Among Republicans

Many Republicans complained that the White House was having the FAA make cuts that inflicted the most pain on travelers to drum up opposition to budget cuts. For example, Republican Rep. Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said in a statement that the FAA had the power "to reduce costs elsewhere, such as contracts, travel, supplies, and consultants, or to apply furloughs in a manner that better protects the most critical air-traffic-control facilities."

Nicholas Calio, who heads the aviation industry trade group named Airlines For America, labeled the furloughs "unjust, unnecessary and completely irresponsible."

But FAA Administrator Michael Huerta told a Senate committee earlier this month that the automatic spending cuts left the agency with no spending flexibility.

The new legislation allows the FAA to shift $253 million around among accounts to provide the spending flexibility to end the controller furloughs.

'A Temporary Band-Aid'

White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement that the legislation will help travelers, "but ultimately, this is no more than a temporary Band-Aid that fails to address the overarching threat to our economy posed by the sequester's mindless across the board cuts."

The airlines cheered the congressional action. "The winners here are the customers who will be spared from lengthy and needless delays," Calio said.

But some Democrats objected, saying Congress should be ending the entire sequestration, not just giving the FAA a way to work around a portion of it. On the floor of the House, Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland said he opposed the bill. "We ought not to be mitigating the sequester's effect on just one segment, when children, the sick, our military and many other groups who will be impacted by this irresponsible policy are left unhelped."

NPR's Matt Stiles and Tamara Keith contributed to this report.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg seems determined to become the formidable adversary the National Rifle Association has never had.

The billionaire mayor is spending from his personal fortune to help defeat lawmakers who voted against gun control proposals last week and to prop up those who supported the measures.

Bloomberg's first target is a Democratic senator facing a tough fight for re-election in 2014: Mark Pryor of Arkansas.

Pryor knows he's a marked man. Whether he's actually sweating it is the question. He's said it before, and he's saying it now: He doesn't take gun advice from the mayor of New York City. He listens to Arkansas.

"I guess the way I look at it [is] it's just another one of the outside groups that's going to try to come in," he says. "I think, you know, honestly, that's what's wrong with politics today is all these outside groups come in and try to do that. But I can't stop it from happening."

And with that, Pryor hurries onto an underground train that will whisk him away from reporters back to his office at the Capitol.

The Two-Way

Senate Rejects Expanded Background Checks For Gun Sales

Crushed blossoms at the end of the summer: teach me
how to coax nectar from the bloom of another.

Burned rice on the stove again: what's to love
but my imperfections — you'll forgive me another.

Butter by a kettle always melts, warns the proverb.
Heated, greased, we slip one into the other.

When, inexplicably, you enter my prayers,
I hear messages from one god or another.

Me encanta cantar, cuando estoy sola, en el carro.
My mother tongue dissolves. I speak in another.

Heart-thief, enter the fields like a woman in love,
vase in one hand, shears in the other

From Dhaka Dust, copyright 2011 by Dilruba Ahmed. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

President Obama has spoken at two memorial services in just over a week — one for victims of the Boston Marathon attack and one for those who died in the chemical plant explosions in West, Texas. In both speeches, he focused on victims and survivors.

But other Democrats are using these events to talk about another subject: the role of government.

The day after the Boston explosions, while thousands of investigators were searching for evidence, retired Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts told MSNBC that while much was still unknown, he wanted to "talk about what we do know."

"Let's be thankful that we have spent a lot of tax money to build up the capacity to do this," he said, arguing that the police, FBI agents and others in Boston make a strong case for what is often derided as "big government."

"It's very fashionable these days for people in my former line of work to brag about how they cut government, reduced government," he added. "Well, I'm glad that they weren't as successful as they wanted to be."

Some liberals made a related argument when an explosion and fire killed a dozen people in Texas. They said government regulations exist to prevent those kinds of disasters from happening.

"The point is, government actually does something, and this makes it very concrete," says Dean Baker, who directs the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. "It's the job of government inspectors to look into, certainly, fertilizer [factories] — we know these are dangerous places — to look at them and make sure that companies are following good safety procedures, so that you don't get explosions like that."

People who want smaller government say liberals are reaching the wrong conclusions from these events.

"We always have to be careful about trying to childproof the country," says James Carafano, a security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "It's always bad to make public policy off a single tragedy — particularly when you're talking with chemical facilities. If your answer is, 'I never want to have a chemical fire or incident,' then you might as well not have a chemical industry."

And conservatives argue that while government regulations might prevent some disasters, they also impose a real burden on innocent people and businesses every day. Onkar Ghate with the Ayn Rand Institute says regulations add to overhead.

"They impose an enormous cost on companies and all individual Americans of the amount of paperwork and regulations that you have to go through when you're not doing anything wrong," Ghate says.

These disagreements about the role and size of government are as old as the country. They were a central issue in last year's presidential campaign. Republican Mitt Romney often said that if elected, he would unshackle American business by getting government out of the way.

Obama often says "the government is us" — the schools, roads and research centers that help the country thrive.

"As a nation, we've always come together through our government to help create the conditions where both workers and businesses can succeed," he said in Osawatomie, Kan., late in 2011.

This ideological split came into focus again this week as Congress revisited the spending cuts known as the sequester. Lawmakers created these cuts as part of an effort to shrink the government.

This week, people got upset when air traffic controller furloughs led to long flight delays.

So Congress undid that part of those cuts Friday. An earlier exception had been made for meat inspectors, as well.

"We have been fed a narrative or an argument or a story that the government can't do anything right," says Neera Tanden with the progressive Center for American Progress. "And what's been interesting about the sequester is that people are beginning to pay attention to the fact that there are ways in which the government has a positive role, and we don't like that role to be taken away."

Polls consistently show that people want less government spending. Polls also show that people don't want the government to cut back on specific services.

The tug of war between the parties is all about reconciling these two deeply held, mutually exclusive desires.