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See how your Congressman is doing on travel. | |||
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| Jim Clyburn | John Spratt | Lindsey Graham | Earnest "Fritz" Hollings |
Some of the jaunts are non-glamorous, such as a mid-December trip Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., took to St. Paul, Minn., to visit 3M Inc.'s headquarters.
But other places on the list read like a rock concert tour – Cancun, Denver, Jerusalem, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Stockholm, Taipei – and the itineraries frequently include vacation destinations such as the Greenbrier, a luxury resort in the West Virginia mountains with a golf course, spa and Land Rover driving school.
Groups as diverse as powerful corporate lobbying associations and nonpartisan public policy think tanks spend millions of dollars each year on the excursions. The trips range from nonpartisan retreats to all-out pushes to influence the congressional agenda.
Special interests defend the travel, saying it's a vital part of educating Congress on issues directly affected by the laws it passes. Critics contend travel paid for by special interests pollutes the democratic process. Many of the members of Congress contacted for this story declined to be interviewed.
"This is a subject that most of us would just as well not talk about,” said Rep. Melvin Watt, D-N.C., who said in a lengthy interview that travel can play an important role in a lawmaker's job.
Watt recently returned from the Bahamas, where he and his wife spent five days courtesy of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Aspen Institute, which sponsors public policy seminars.
It's difficult to know how much money industry and other outside sources spend flying members of Congress and their staffs to points around the globe. Congress members and staffers who travel on the private dime must file reports with the Senate or House detailing who paid for the trips and how much was spent. But in the House, the reports are filed manually in dozens of notebooks, making them cumbersome to compile. Senate records are computerized but not available on the Internet.
In 1997, members of Congress and their staffs accepted $6.4 million in free travel from private groups, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the most recent group to compile travel records for all 535 members of Congress and their staffs.
Some members of Congress and their staffs take few trips. Since Jan. 1, 2003, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., reported just one paid by private interests: a $1,500 trip for an agriculture aide to tour North Carolina, paid for by the N.C. Farm Bureau and the N.C. Agricultural Foundation at N.C. State University.
On the higher end of the spectrum, Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., and his staff accepted 23 trips costing nearly $60,000 during the same period. Critics say the trips give special interests access to members of Congress and their staffs that many other people don't have.
The trips don't necessarily change anyone's vote, said Paul Sanford, general counsel for the Center for Responsive Politics. "But these trips foster the development of personal relationships,” he said. "It is these personal relationships that they are later able to again access, and they are then able to make a pitch for a vote.”
Gary Hopper, vice president of General Atomics, a San Diego-based research and development, energy, transportation and defense company, agrees that the trips are about "relationship-building.”
"There's not any quid pro quo where someone is expecting something on policy issues or funding,” he said.
Fifty years ago, congressional travel paid for by industry and other outside interests was frowned upon.
In 1951, a Senate subcommittee expressed concerns about gifts to public officials. Paying hotel or travel costs is "clearly improper …,” a panel report said. "The difficulty comes in drawing the line between the innocent or proper and that which is designing or improper. At the moment a doubt arises as to propriety, the line should be drawn.”
By the 1980s, congressional travel was in high gear. Trips frequently had more to do with beaches and bars than agriculture or aviation.
Rules governing the trips have tightened in the past two decades. For example, the trip must relate to the committee assignments or area of expertise of the Congress member or his staff. The trip sponsor cannot pay for lavish entertainment, although congressional staffers can and have accepted tickets to such things as baseball games or the circus. And members of the appropriations committees, which decide how taxpayer money is spent, do not accept trips from private industry.
"The days of abuse that took place years ago where someone drops you off on an island in Tahiti and comes and picks you up after three weeks, that doesn't occur any more,” said Hopper of General Atomics, which sends a handful of congressional staffers on trips once or twice a year. Last spring, General Atomics spent $11,517 to send an aide to Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., to Italy's Aviano Air Base, a joint American-Italian military base. Some of General Atomics' roughly $50 million in government contracts are in Shelby's home state.
"Any man or woman who works on Capitol Hill right now is bombarded with tons of issues,” Hopper said. "These trips allow them to … make informed decisions.”
The Nuclear Energy Institute is a frequent trip sponsor and has been for many years, sponsoring as many as 10 trips a year to Yucca Mountain, Nev., a two-hour bus ride from Las Vegas. The trips paid off two summers ago when Congress approved a controversial plan establishing Yucca Mountain as the future site of a national repository for nuclear waste.
"Seeing is believing,” NEI spokesman Steve Kerekes said of the trips. "Nuclear technology is not the simplest kind of issue to grasp. … Yucca Mountain is just a windswept, barren rock with nothing as far as the eye can see. You can say that, but until you actually see it, it's a totally different thing.”
NEI, which also sponsors overseas trips to nuclear plants and factories that manufacture parts for the plants, still has a keen interest in the workings of Congress. Lawmakers must decide how to spend more than $13 billion that's in a nuclear waste fund built up from a surcharge on nuclear-generated industry.
The closest metropolitan airport to Yucca Mountain is in Las Vegas, and some down time is allowed for in the NEI trips, Kerekes said. "We make it a point to stay in an off-strip hotel, partly from a perception standpoint,” he said. "We don't want to feed in to the perception that there's something that shouldn't be going on.”
Watt, whose recent Bahamas trip focused on Brazil's economy and emerging democracy , said when Congress considers South American trade agreements later this year, he'll be more informed "than probably any member of Congress when it comes time to vote.”
The Aspen Institute, which paid for the excursion, is a frequent sponsor of trips taken by Watt.
Aspen trips "are always very substantive,” he said. "They are bipartisan, they deal with a particular subject in-depth, which we have little time for in Washington. And they allow us to bring spouses, which means we can go without having to spend more time away from the spouses. … I don't want to go places without my spouse because we spend enough time separated.”
Watt dismisses the notion that the trips are like vacations.
"I can assure you if I really wanted to take a vacation, I'd stay at home or go up to the mountains of North Carolina,” he said.
| REP. JIM CLYBURN, D-6th - $42,930 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, R-SC - $53,503 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| SEN. ERNEST F. HOLLINGS, D-SC $3,287 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| REP. JOHN M. SPRATT, D-5th $11,148 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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