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"Junket Jim" McDermott Outpaces DeLay
June 08, 2005
Here's why the Tom Delay "ethics" thing never bugged me out. Just like hiring of relatives, Congressional junkets, oops - I mean "fact-finding missions" and "speaking engagements" - are a bi-artisan scam in Congress. And U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Seattle) far outpaces DeLay. The Seattle Weekly's Rick Anderson reports: It's not just...Texas Rep. Tom DeLay or Republicans who accept special-interest travel funds. (Since 2000), says PoliticalMoneyLine.com, House and Senate Democrats took 3,025 trips and Republicans 2,375 trips, in all worth almost $16 million—most sponsored by groups not required to disclose where the money originated. The No. 1 spender was the educational Aspen Institute ($3.1 million) and No. 1 user was Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. (19 trips for $176,000). Thirteenth on the list of 618 present and former members is Rep. Jim McDermott, the Seattle Democrat, who reported 39 trips worth $141,000. (For comparison, DeLay, ranked 28th, took 14 trips for $94,000). I'd be happy to suppport a total ban on sponsored travel for members of Congress, as suggested in this Seattle Times op-ed not long ago by Tim Burgess, a former Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission chair, and (full disclosure) a recent blog consulting client of mine. (I've blogged Tim's work even before we collaborated, and think he's an excellent writer and a strong community activist, not to mention someone who, IMHO, ought to run for Seattle City Council before too long). Without a ban on sponsored travel for members of Congress such as that proposed by Burgess, it's fairly pointless to try to wring partisan juice from the practice. Yet while I readily concede there's no shortage of self-interested or sleazy scroundrels in both political parties, one of the most rank D.C. schemes ever had to be Democrat and then-House Speaker Jim Wright's insider deal to foist bulk purchases of a sub-par memoir he wrote onto special interest groups including the Fertilizer Institute so he could evade speaking fee limits. That said, I still wish a hardliner like House Majority Leader DeLay wasn't such a prominent face of the GOP. I know we agree on foreign policy and probably a few other things. And like him or not, he has earned his political chits over the years to get where he is. It's just that sometimes he has trouble spending the chits wisely. Posted by Matt Rosenberg at June 8, 2005 01:59 PM Comments:
The morality of the average Congressperson is about the same as the morality of the average tax cheat. Both will bend, or even break, the rules when they believe they can do so with impunity, and for much the same reason: they do not see such behavior as fundamentally wrong. By all means publicize such misconduct when you find it, and embarass them if you can. But let's not kid ourselves into supposing that we can prevent it altogether by adopting a set of rules. Such an effort, like campaign finance reform, will either fail entirely or produce even more perverse consequences than those we are trying squelch. This is a counsel of despair, I admit, but we can take consolation in the fact that the amount of taxpayer money Tom Delay or Jim McDermott "waste" on themselves is peanuts compared to the amount they spend bribing constituents to re-elect them. Send them on more junkets; they will do far less damage. Posted by: Tom Rekdal at June 8, 2005 07:32 PMPost a comment
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