EDINBURGH — The expenses racked up by U.S. lawmakers traveling here for a conference last month included one for the “control room.”
Besides rooms for sleeping, the 12 members of the House of Representatives rented their hotel’s fireplace-equipped presidential suite and two adjacent rooms. The hotel cleared out the beds and in their place set up a bar, a snack room and office space. The three extra rooms — stocked with liquor, Coors beer, chips and salsa, sandwiches, Mrs. Fields cookies and York Peppermint Patties — cost a total of about $1,500 a night. They were rented for five nights.
While in Scotland, the House members toured historic buildings. Some shopped for Scotch whisky and visited the hotel spa. They capped the trip with a dinner at one of the region’s finest restaurants, paid for by the legislators, who got $118 daily stipends for meals and incidentals.
Eleven of the 12 legislators then left the five-day conference two days early.
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Ever since a corruption scandal in 2005 led to restrictions on privately funded travel, legislators have been taking more trips paid for by the government.
The cost they reported for such travel abroad was $13 million in 2008, a 70% jump from 2005, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records. Lawmakers don’t have to report the cost of domestic travel when the government pays. The $13 million didn’t include the expense of flying on Air Force planes, which lawmakers don’t have to disclose.
Over the 2005-08 period, the cost of legislators’ privately funded travel, both domestic and overseas, fell 70%, to $2.9 million, according to LegiStorm.com, a Web site that tracks it.
Lawmakers must reveal only general information about the travel, such as countries visited. Several weeks after a trip, they report the overall cost, without a detailed breakdown. This account of congressional travel is based on trip itineraries provided by lawmakers, meeting schedules and what two Journal reporters saw. Mr. Tanner’s office and other lawmakers confirmed many details of the account and didn’t dispute the others.
The blending of business and pleasure on the trip to Scotland was typical, aides and lawmakers say. In August, two Republican senators, Richard Shelby of Alabama and John Cornyn of Texas, went to Europe with their wives and aides to meet with banking regulators and industry executives. Military officials picked up Mr. Shelby’s luggage at his office. A separate government car drove him and his wife to the airport. “That is typically how the military handles departures on congressional delegations,” said a spokesman for the senator.
(Read more from online.wsj.com)
Isn’t that special!