Public interest groups urge more scrutiny of travel

Some Congress members and staffers recently made a trip to Azerbaijan. Taxpayers didn't foot the bill, which on the surface most of us might consider a good thing. But according to the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent oversight agency, the details of exactly who did pay for the trip are still murky -- which, in a country that supposedly considers transparency in government a core value, is decidedly not a good thing.

The Azerbaijan junket is Exhibit A in a petition by several government watchdog groups to new House Speaker Paul Ryan to take a hard look at rules (such as they are) governing the private funding of foreign travel by House members and their staffs.

Led by Common Cause, the petitioners also include, among others, Public Citizen, Democracy 21 and the League of Women Voters.

"The Office of Congressional Ethics recently issued a report laying out how the sources of funds and sponsorship of Members' and staff travel to Azerbaijan were purposefully obfuscated," the group wrote in a letter to Ryan, "and that obvious red flags of the deception, such as multiple groups claiming sole responsibility for sponsoring the trip and none of these groups had sufficient funds to pay for the trip, were ignored by the House Committee on Ethics."

The fact that publicly unaccountable foreign governments and private interests are paying to fly American lawmakers, and sometimes their families and staffs, around the world should make us all uncomfortable. It suggests a level of access to and influence over high-level government that the average American citizen not only can't compete with, but under these circumstances can't even be informed about.

"The amount of privately sponsored travel, once slashed by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act to one-third its previous levels," the letter said, "is again rising to near the level of the Jack Abramoff travel junket era."

If that name doesn't put the issue in perspective, nothing will. Abramoff, of course, is the notorious former heavyweight lobbyist whose high-level machinations resulted not only in his own prison sentence, but also in the criminal convictions or guilty pleas of 21 others, including White House staffers, members of Congress and various aides and assistants.

The petitioners' suggested remedies would be neither extreme nor difficult: A bipartisan task force, to include leaders of the Ethics and Administration committees as well as the aforementioned independent Office of Congressional Ethics, would review current rules about privately funded travel, and investigate "whether shell companies are providing resources to the purported sponsors of overseas trips."

It was also suggested that the panel should seriously consider the stricter, but certainly simpler, remedy of using only public funds for all official travel. Yes, that would put these "fact-finding" forays wholly on the public tab. And then voters could decide, come election time, whether their money really was spent in their interest.

This story was originally published November 5, 2015 at 4:10 PM with the headline "Public interest groups urge more scrutiny of travel."