Pete Buttigieg on airline delays and SCOTUS LGBTQ ruling

WASHINGTON, D.C. (CBS, KYMA/KECY) - In an interview with Face the Nation moderator Margaret Brennan, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said that severe weather ahead of the holiday weekend "put enormous pressure on the system," but also said "the overall picture" shows "a lot of improvements."

"Now the good news is, on Friday, we saw according to TSA, a record number of airline passengers, probably the most ever in America, and we saw those cancellation rates stay low. Right now, we're below 2%. But they really shot up at the first part of the week, largely because of severe weather hitting some of our key hubs. And it was really the first time this year that we'd had an episode like that in those busy summer, weekends and- and months. So this is where I think the work that we've done to enhance passenger rights to dramatically improve what passengers can expect from airlines, compared to even one year ago is paying off," Buttigieg remarked while adding that there is "more work to be done."

During the interview, Buttigieg was asked about the Supreme Court's ruling on the LGBTQ rights, saying "there's no evidence" that the web designer in the Supreme Court case on LGBTQ rights "was ever even approached by a same-sex couple looking for services."

"We're seeing more and more of these cases in these circumstances that are designed to get people spun up and designed to chip away at rights. And I think the bigger picture here, when you look at the Supreme Court taking away a woman's right to choose. You look at Friday's decision diminishing the equality of same sex couples. You look at a number of the decisions that have been made, they pose a question that is even deeper than these big cases. And the question is this, did we just live to see the high watermark of freedoms and rights in this country before they were gradually taken away," Buttigieg expressed.