Stop Bashing Congressional Travel
Don't insulate Members of Congress and staff from constituents and other nations, including privately-funded excursions. They often serve a valuable purpose, and we all benefit.
“Junket.”
You know the word. It conjures up images of tinkling champagne glasses poolside in warm, sunny places, gathering for a lovely brunch before a guided, taxpayer-funded tour of historical monuments. Or a nice sunset boat ride in Hong Kong Harbor and tickets to Hamilton on Broadway.
“With COVID on the wane, Congress is back to global travel - on your dime,” screamed the headline in USA Today. “Taxpayers fund a first-class congressional foreign travel boom,” reads another.
“10 Top Congressional Travel Destinations” blares a US News and World Report headline, complete with a slide show.
That’s the image many Americans have of congressional travel, much of it taken during cold winter “district work periods” or perhaps the dog days of August.
We have news media and special interest “watchdog” organizations to thank for that. And it’s too bad because the reality is very different.
Some of the travel is taxpayer funded; other excursions are paid for privately by educational “foundations” subsidized by foreign governments, corporations, philanthropists, or other “interests. They take many forms. I’ve been on a few, sponsored others, and run into some while on a personal vacation. I recently saw a delegation of US Senators at Musee’ d’Orsay in Paris, accompanied by US Embassy officials. They were there for NATO meetings.
Sure, we expect some officials to travel. It’s part of their job. Think of the State Department or perhaps the Department of Defense and their far-flung facilities, programs, and deployments. Then, of course, there’s the President, perhaps his (or her) national security advisor. We salute the surprise visits to hostile zones for the President to enjoy Thanksgiving or Christmas with troops.
We rarely criticize their excursions (unless you’re looking for a politically-motivated reason to do so). So why blame committee chairs and members with funding or oversight responsibilities over those officials and their programs? Don’t we benefit when they can build relationships with parliamentary colleagues worldwide?
Take, for example, the Canada-US Inter-Parliamentary Group. Or the Mexico-US Inter-Parliamentary Group. And there’s an Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) of global legislators.
As the Secretary of the US Senate, I attended an IPU meeting in Istanbul once in 1996. Members of Congress had not attended one of IPU’s biannual meetings since before the Soviet Union dissolved. Before then, groups of American legislators would arrive to counter an equally large Soviet delegation. We lost interest when the USSR was no more. I had heard from IPU officials that the US was missed, especially in the early 1990s as formerly-USSR client states experienced a rebirth of parliamentary democracy, especially in eastern Europe. A vacuum emerged. I saw the benefit of American legislators building relationships and helping spread democracy.
The late Conrad Burns (R-MT) who officially “chaired” the US delegation to the IPU, instructed me why Members of Congress no longer attended. He was the last Senator to attend one of the IPU’s weeklong meetings and as a result, missed votes in Congress. “I swore I’d never do that again,” I remember him telling me. But he blessed me with an effort to change the schedule so Senators and House members could attend without missing votes.
I successfully won a temporary change in the schedule. I recruited Canadian Members of Parliament to help. Despite our efforts, Senators and House members didn’t want to attend. Despite the clamoring of emerging democracies, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich opposed House participation in the IPU and worked to eliminate what small travel budget had been allocated. He was eventually successful.
The US, a founding member of the IPU, canceled its membership. Sudan is the only other nation that is not a member. Some company, that.
There is much more support for bilateral inter-parliamentary programs, especially in our hemisphere. Our borders with Canada and Mexico have strong domestic interests (e.g., immigration, illegal drugs, etc.), especially from legislators whose districts or states border our neighbors. I remember intense debates in 1996 over “Helms-Burton” Act, named after conservative US Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) and US Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) that strengthened and broadened the US embargo against Communist Cuba to include its trading partners and punish entities trafficking in Cuban property once owned by Americans.
Canada was, and remains, one of Cuba’s strongest trading partners. The law might never have passed the Senate or been signed by President Bill Clinton had the Cuban Air Fore not shot down two private planes on a humanitarian mission. Oops. Nevertheless, every President, including President Donald Trump, has signed waivers to the law since it was enacted.
Of greater concern to so-called “good government” groups is privately-funded travel. And I’ve been on both sides of that equation.
In 1995, I accepted my only private-funded overseas trip as a public employee to China, organized through a nonprofit organization and supported by corporate contributions. Its mission was to build stronger ties between American policymakers and staff with counterparts in Asia. Our corporate sponsors, including organizations such as Philip Morris and Pepsico, were to understand the opportunities and challenges of doing business in China. As with all such trips, it was fully disclosed with my boss's approval, US Senator Don Nickles (R-OK), then-chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee.
Our travels included meetings with local, provincial, and national leaders nationwide and with US business leaders in Shanghai, home to about 10 percent of all the world’s construction cranes at the time. Chinese officials at the time were aggressively seeking US investment.
We also visited Hong Kong, where a group of millionaires under 40 - the Young Industrialists Council - hosted us. One took me to a professional tennis tournament for part of an afternoon. This was two years before the British handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. I remember asking my host what his expectations were and whether he had any contingency plans if things didn’t work out.
He pulled two passports out of his pocket - one Chinese, the other Canadian. He had contingency plans.
You don’t get those experiences and build those relationships behind a desk in a cramped Capitol Hill office. It was invaluable and highly instructive.
The same proved true for another public-private trip, this one to Estonia, two years earlier under the auspices of the International Republican Institute. The IRI and its counterpart, the National Democratic Institute, were established under the auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy, a Reagan Administration initiative to help nations convert to functioning democracies. Along with a friend and former Republican National Committee official, I was dispatched to Estonia to help volunteers in this recently freed former Soviet bloc nation how to create political parties and run for elective office.
We were starting from scratch. Witnessing Estonia’s rebirth from communist tyranny to freedom was eye-opening and inspiring. IRI and NDI operated both with federal grants and private contributions. They still do. Estonia holds a special place in my heart. Today, it is one of Europe's freest and most prosperous nations with a hostile neighbor to its east.
When I first visited Tallinn, Estonia in May 1993, it was dreary— decaying Soviet-era buildings and subways were everywhere. My room was a hotel converted from Russian officers’ quarters that might earn two stars on Travelocity. Pedestrians scurried from place to place, not looking you or anyone in the eye. Drab and colorless. Tallinn in 2019, when I returned, was a very different, more vibrant place.
A few years later, upon joining the food industry as an advocate (okay, lobbyist), I helped organize and lead “congressional field studies.” Through the association I worked for, we solicited company sponsorships and recruited congressional staffers for an all-expense-paid trip to the San Joaquin Valley (Modesto in August is lovely), hot and windy northern Illinois, or central Pennsylvania for tours of food processing facilities and farms.
These “junkets” included visits to tomato processing facilities in Stockton, California, sometimes after following trucks brimming with freshly harvested tomatoes to see them converted into “red sauce” for further processing into pasta sauce, soup, or juice. We also visited chocolate factories, snack makers, a bakery, and cereal manufacturers. We were taught the difference between “freestone” and “cling” peaches and watched how they were processed into cans and single-serve packages.
Water, pesticide use, USDA grading, and making a simple can of corn, peaches, or green beans were explained.
This education was fully disclosed and didn’t cost the taxpayers a dime.
Oh, sure, consumer “advocates” complain about the “unfair advantage” companies “enjoy” in such circumstances, but we were the ones making things of value that provided safe nutrition at affordable prices. Lobbyists didn’t do most of the talking during these trips - what did they know - but toxicologists, processing experts, farmers, growers, and plant managers did. We facilitated real exchanges between Members of Congress, congressional staff, and the people who made our products.
I wish everyone could see how products like canned foods are made.
Oh, and there was the one time I worked with the Government of Canada to facilitate a visit by congressional chiefs of staff to Canada to appreciate cross-border trade issues more fully. I facilitated a visit to a manufacturing facility my employer operated (no longer) in downtown Toronto that made soup for both the US and Canadian markets.
Canadian taxpayers paid for that.
Of course, we had fun on these trips, including convivial dinners and an occasional diversion to places like Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania. But to this day, I will occasionally encounter a staffer from one of those trips who extolled how it was one of the most valuable experiences of their career, especially as a young staffer with limited experience with the real world of manufacturing.
Thanks to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2008, such “congressional field studies” are now illegal. Lobbyists are no longer allowed to travel on privately-funded congressional trips. There are now fewer opportunities for congressional staff, most not even 30 years old with minimal real-world experiences, to learn how things are made. And they’re the gatekeepers of information between constituents, lobbyists, and the Members of Congress for whom they work.
HLOGA resulted from one very bad apple in the lobbying world who skirted existing lobbying laws and helped land at least one Member of Congress in jail. That bad apple had a movie made about him, starring Kevin Spacey.
Let’s be clear. These “junkets” are highly regulated and transparent. There are no secrets. No paid vacations, these, other than a welcome diversion from answering emails in cramped Capitol hill offices.
I’m reminded of a great program instituted by the late David Pryor, former Democratic Senator from Arkansas, who dispatched his Washington, DC staff most every August for “work a day” projects in the Diamond State. His press secretary could be spotted pumping gas. A legislative assistant sacking groceries. It gave Washington, DC staff a taste of real life in the state their boss represented.
Senator Pryor was never seriously challenged during his career in Congress.
Undaunted by stiffening lobbying laws, I took it upon myself as a corporate lobbyist to aggressively invite US Senators, House members, and state legislators to my employer’s manufacturing facilities in their respective home states. I know I changed votes on at least two occasions, not including the trust built by elected officials seeing the integrity put into the manufacturing process. Yet, advocates are clamoring to build even stronger walls between congress, their staff, and the people they represent.
There may always be the occasional Congressman or staff that abuses public or private travel. I get that. But criticizing Members for travel and limiting the ability of staff to understand the people and employers they represent serves no one’s interest.
There is another very important benefit of the "junkets." My mentor in politics, the late Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt, lamented the loss of trips with colleagues from across the aisle. He believed that those trips, many of them hours long, made for a more civil Congress. His point being that the trips were one of the few, if not only, times members of Congress from both political parties and all political beliefs actually spent personal time with each other for long periods of time with no or very few staff. Basically, the fundamental understanding that personal interaction creates trust and makes it more difficult to treat each other way reps and senators do today.