Looking bad in a bi-partisan fashion
Anyone who has read the political pages for a few years will remember stories about Congressional "fact finding" missions to places where the main facts seem to concern the yardage to the 16th green or the SPF one needs to apply.
Well, here's another one. It's a pretty comprehensive look by The Center for Public Integrity and some partner groups.
The summary:
In the summer of 2005, the Center for Public Integrity, Northwestern University's Medill News Service and American Public Media began examining disclosure documents for about 23,000 privately funded trips taken by members of Congress and staffers over a 5 1/2 -year period. While some of these trips no doubt were educational, others appeared to be thinly veiled attempts by special interests to influence lawmakers and their advisers.
The center's site didn't have too much info up regarding the honorables from NC, but Medill News Service does:
North Carolina lawmakers and their staffs took about 470 privately funded trips at a cost of nearly $1.2 million during a five-year period beginning in 2000.All told, members of Congress and their staffs took about 23,000 trips paid for by private sponsors at a cost of $48.9 million from Jan. 1, 2000, through June 30, 2005, according to an analysis of official travel reports compiled by Medill News Service, the Center for Public Integrity and American Public Media. The data come from trip reports filed by lawmakers to congressional ethics committees.
Click here for the full story.
From the Medill piece, an info graphic:
Congressional travel, by NC Congressional office, 1/2000-8/2005:HOUSE
- G.K. Butterfield (D-1st): 7 trips, $11,100
- Bob Etheridge (D-2nd): 23 trips, $90,000
- Walter Jones (D-3rd): 16 trips, $26,600
- David Price (D-4th): 31 trips. $128,300
- Richard Burr (R-5th) 31 trips, $75,000
- Virginia Fox (R-5th): 7 trips, $9,500
- Howard Coble (R-6th): 76 trips, $155,000
- Mike McIntyre (D-7th) 19 trips, $33,000
- Robin Hayes (R-8th) 37 trips, $66,000
- Sue Myrick (R-9th) 27 trips, $37,000
- Patrick McHenry (R-10th) 3 trips $3,500
- Charles Taylor (R-11th) 9 trips $32,700
- Melvin Watt (D-12th) 52 trips $150,000
- Brad Miller (D-13th) 11 trips, $21,300
SENATE
- Richard Burr: 1 trip, $1,000
- Elizabeth Dole: 12 trips, $20,700
By my reading, Reps. Coble and Watt are the champion trip-takers from NC, both of who represent Greensboro.
A word of caution before you get too crazy with all this: some of this travel is legit. The problem is, as the stories linked to above suggest, it's difficult to sort through which ones are actually serve the public interest and which ones are little more than legal bribes.
Why so difficult? Because Congress makes it that way. From the center's "How we did it" piece:
But when the same people or groups pay for a "fact-finding mission," that information is put on paper forms, then filed in three-ring binders or input into a computer system, and made available only in the office buildings where the records are stored.The House of Representatives' forms are kept in a sub-basement of the Cannon House Office Building, where the public copies were often hard to read, torn and misfiled. Researchers were told it was against House rules to digitally scan the documents — they had to make photocopies instead.
The Senate travel disclosure documents are stored in a computer system in the Hart Senate Office Building, and can be searched by the name of the traveler or the senator approving the travel. But those records are not available online. So researchers went to the building and printed them out.
As always, the comment lines are open.