Banning Congressional Private travel?
Posted by Moonage on 05 Jun 2006 | Tagged as: Opinions
OK, here’s the latest shocking headline:
Over a 5½-year period ending in 2005, members of Congress and their aides took at least 23,000 trips valued at almost $50 million financed by private sponsors, many of them corporations, trade associations and nonprofit groups with business on Capitol Hill.
While some of these trips might qualify as legitimate fact-finding missions, the purpose of others is less clear.
There’s nothing "less clear" IMO to most of the trips. Now, what you have to ignore is that any association has any business with DC or is affected by the laws they pass. That’s all you have to do to then perceive this as a 100% bad thing. Businesses and associations have every right under the Constitution to state their case of how funding and legislation is important to them. There is no law that says they have to state their case in Washington DC. It is also the expectation and right of the legislators to make sure what they are spending taxpayer’s money on is being spent the way it was supposed to be. And, in order to make this appear as bad as you possibly can, you have to assume that any one group gets to do this and none of the others do. And, it is the obligation of legislators to show off their communities for potential economic development.
Now, I’m not naive enough to think all trips are legitimate, but this article targets some specific industries and individuals and totally dismisses the fact that these are important industries to the US. The article goes into great detail about what constitutes unethical trips, but doesn’t single out the individuals that took these trips, and then summarily names a few names without distinguishing the legitimacy of their trips. In other words, smear by insinuation. Just because a person travels a lot doesn’t mean they are obviously the most guilty. Richard Luger may have cost a lot, but he’s very important and can get legislation passed. Someone else may have cost a lot less, but their abuse more egregious. I’m totally opposed to the concept of banning all private travel. People have the right of access to their legislators. It’s purely up to the legislator to keep their ethics in check. If the individual legislator can’t keep their ethics in check, banning travel won’t affect a thing. They’ll jsut walk in and hand them the money.
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