Hastert Directs Ethics Panel to Assess Travel Requests

The House’s top Republican, seeking to seize the initiative on ethics issues, has called on the chamber’s watchdog panel to start pre-approving members’ privately funded trips.

In a letter delivered Wednesday evening, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) directed the Ethics Committee to institute “specific and comprehensive guidance to members and staff” on travel issues.

The travel issue has proved politically embarrassing for Republicans since questions arose this year about trips taken by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

House rules prohibit lobbyists or foreign agents from paying for trips by members. But media reports indicated that lobbyists paid at least some of the expenses of DeLay’s trip to a Scottish golf resort in 2000, and that an organization registered as a foreign agent underwrote a trip he took to South Korea in 2001.

DeLay has said he did not knowingly violate House rules.

The stories about DeLay’s travels triggered a rush by Democrats and Republicans in the House to amend travel reports, going back several years -- evidence, Republicans said, that the rules governing travel were confusing.

Many private groups -- from think tanks to corporations -- routinely fund first-class travel for lawmakers to destinations around the globe. Such travel is allowed under House rules, as long as members report it and follow certain guidelines. Democrats and Republicans defend the travel as a means to educate lawmakers without spending tax dollars.

Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Col.), whom Hastert removed as chairman of the Ethics Committee in February, said the rules governing travel could be hard to understand.

Now that the committee had more resources, Hefley said, it was “a good idea” for the panel to pre-approve all privately funded trips. “What you want to do is keep people out of trouble at the front end, rather than prosecute them on the back end,” he said.

One Washington watchdog group, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility, said it was wrong to shift the burden of responsibility for ethical conduct from individual members to a committee.

“The problem never really was that the rules were unclear,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the nonprofit organization. “It is that everybody was violating the rules. This is a new way for members to avoid responsibility for being ethical. Everybody else in America has to be ethical and follow the rules. Why is it so hard for members of Congress?”

Democrats have sought to use the travel issue to score political points against Republicans, saying it is evidence that they have fostered a lax ethical atmosphere in the House during their 10 years in power -- an argument the GOP used effectively when they ended Democratic dominance of the chamber.

Some Republicans said Hastert’s directive was meant to defuse the potency of the ethics issue as lawmakers prepared to return to their districts for a monthlong recess.

“This takes one more issue away from the Democrats,” Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) said. “The speaker is taking control of the ethics issue.”

Hastert’s letter was sent to Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), chairman of the Ethics Committee, and Rep. Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia, the panel’s ranking Democrat.

Hastert asked them to use some of the 40% budget increase the House gave the committee this year to start pre-approving travel plans.

He said that his “conversations with a number of members on both sides of the aisle lead me to believe that most members would welcome such assistance.”

The committee -- which spent the first six months of the year paralyzed by partisan disputes over rules and staffing -- is expected to begin functioning again after the recess. DeLay has said he looks forward to explaining his travels to the committee.

Mollohan said he welcomed Hastert’s letter and the attention to the travel issue. “But the thing that I will not let happen is the creation of the impression that the travel issue ... is in some way the fault of the rules,” Mollohan said.

He said the Ethics Committee encouraged members to ask the panel whether a trip was appropriate.

“The rules are not complicated,” Mollohan said. “I would not want the rules to be scapegoated in any way for negligent behavior.”

But Ron Bonjean, Hastert’s spokesman, said a problem clearly existed when “more than 200 members of Congress, from both parties, had been down at the clerk’s office” filing amended travel reports in the wake of news accounts of DeLay’s travels.

Bonjean said Hastert sought a more formal process, one that would require members to get the committee’s approval for privately funded trips.

Most of those problems, Mollohan said, had been relatively minor. “What is important here is that the impression not be given to the public that there are hundreds of serious travel violations,” Mollohan said. “An awful lot of these violations are filing mistakes. There will end up being, I predict, relatively few instances of intentional misconduct.”