February 08, 2006, 7:44 a.m.
Traveling Foul
The Democrats’ national pastime.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the February 13, 2006, issue of National Review.

Just days after the GOP announced a “lobbying reform” package meant to mitigate political damage from the Jack Abramoff scandal, the Democrats held a grandstanding press conference at the Library of Congress to announce their own lobbying-reform ideas. Even as Democrats accused the Republicans of not going far enough, their own plan came up short in one widely debated area. While the Republican plan would ban all privately funded travel for congressmen and congressional staff — those “fact-finding missions” to any destination where the facts can be gathered lazily near a golf course or a beach — the Democrats’ plan would leave a loophole open for nonprofits to sponsor trips. According to the New York Times, “Congressional aides said that House Democratic leaders were ready to jettison travel completely but ran into resistance from Senate Democrats who wanted to retain the ability to go on trips sponsored by educational foundations.”

An “educational foundation” can be anything from the Aspen Institute, a think tank that pays for legislators to travel to its roundtable events, to the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council, a lobbyist-linked nonprofit at the center of the Abramoff scandal — so leaving the door open for these groups wouldn’t change the existing rules in any meaningful way. A congressional aide close to the drafting of the GOP reform package put it this way: “The more exceptions you create, the more people will find a way to get around the rules. It’s better just to end it so that people have clear guidelines.”

But ending it would take away one of the Democrats’ favorite perks — the privately funded junket — and leading Democrats are unable to outflank the GOP on this issue because they can’t convince their fellow members to give it up. A survey of the record shows that when it comes to free trips, Democrats have more to hide, and more to lose, than Republicans. . . .

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