Good question, and I am pretty sure I'm not qualified to answer it...butlagerhead wrote: ↑Wed Sep 25, 2019 7:36 am Serious question seacoaster:
Why is it alright for a Senator, who has everything to gain politically by undermining the administration, to have private talks with a state leader but not the Administration. Did Murphy go around the State Department, will we know how this conversation was framed?
Zelensky appears to have had a different impression. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who spoke with Zelensky during an early September visit to Ukraine, said the Ukrainian president “directly” expressed concerns at their meeting that “the aid that was being cut off to Ukraine by the president was a consequence” of his unwillingness to launch an investigation into the Bidens, The Post reported.
I think it is pretty standard practice for members of Congress to travel abroad to areas of concern and to which the United States grants aid, including military assistance. I am certain this is a practice that members of both parties carry on -- we used to call these junkets. Here's a blog article on the more recent, and apparently accelerated, practice of traveling abroad:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/closer-look ... ign-travel
"On Monday, Paul Singer at USA Today reported new data on the burgeoning practice of congressional foreign travel. According to Singer, federal legislators spent more government funds venturing abroad in 2016 than any other year in the past decade, with roughly 40% of the trips costing over $10,000 each. The Senate Armed Services Committee spent more than any other, and the House Intelligence Committee experienced a big jump in expenses under the leadership of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who issued a directive for Committee members to “spend more time in the field.” These are important developments that suggest both the utility of what I’ve called “legislative diplomacy” and the risk of abuse as members of Congress engage in the practice with greater regularity. We also know, however, that the U.S. Government is not the only source of funding—members of Congress also rely on private sponsors. To name just one example, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) recently accepted sponsorship from a nonprofit organization in making a controversial trip to Syria, where she met with Bashar al-Assad.
Which raises the question: How much do we know about this separate domain of privately funded congressional foreign travel? More specifically, how common are non-governmental sponsorships? Has reliance on private sources become more or less common over time? Which members of Congress have participated? Where did they go? And who paid for it?
As it turns out, these questions are surprisingly easy to answer, at least with respect to the House of Representatives. House Rule 25 requires members and staff to file reports detailing any travel-related expenses reimbursed by a non-government source. Under Section 304 of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, the Office of the Clerk must publish the past six years worth of these reports online, so I simply downloaded them and aggregated the data. Here’s what they show:
[See Figure 1: Total Volume of Travel—House (Including Staff)]
As Figure 1 indicates, it’s extremely common for House members and staff to travel abroad on private funding. Since 2011, there have been over 4,000 of these trips, ranging from almost 500 in 2012 to nearly 1,000 in 2015. Virtually every office has been involved, with an average of one to two trips per office per year. It appears that the practice is less common during general election years, perhaps because legislators are busy campaigning. (For whatever reason, the same dip does not appear during the 2014 midterm elections.) It also appears that there was a slight trend toward more travel from 2011 to 2016. (The less-useful Senate Gift Rule Database suggests that private sponsorships are comparably voluminous in the Senate.)
....
First, while travel isn’t limited to one political party, a majority of the top ten (and top twenty) offices were those of Democrats. It’s unclear whether this represents a broader trend. It strikes me as potentially significant, however, that these offices led the way even during a period of consistent Republican majorities. Does this tell us something about minority parties (or Democrats)? It’s hard to say, but one possibility is that the minority, whether Republican or Democrat at any given time, relies upon private funding more frequently than the majority because of the Mutual Security Act of 1954, which conditions the availability of public funds on authorization from the Speaker of the House or the chairperson of a committee. On this hypothesis, private funding has been uniquely attractive to House Democrats in recent years because the alternative would force them to seek authorization from House Republicans, who have held exclusive power under the Act to permit the use of public funds.
Second, among the ten leading offices, privately funded travel doesn’t correlate with service on the Foreign Affairs Committee or Intelligence Committee. Among the most frequent flyers, Rep. Engel is the only one who’s currently a Foreign Affairs Committee member. Rep. Larsen serves on the Armed Services Committee, but none of the others has an obvious committee-based justification for frequent travel abroad. This raises questions about the utility of the practice, particularly when the fact of private sponsorship legally requires a non-official purpose. What, precisely, are members and staff getting out of all this? I’m open to the possibility that going abroad is worthwhile even for those who don’t serve on a committee with jurisdiction over foreign affairs, but it’s hard to say definitively on the current state of the evidence."
The author concludes as follows:
"In the end, the evidence reinforces the need for critical inquiry with respect to the contemporary practice of legislative diplomacy. With an apparent boom in both publicly and privately funded travel, it’s worth considering whether the current patterns are defensible: Are the top destinations reflective of U.S. national interests, or merely the result of uncoordinated, ad hoc, individual decisions that defy a systemic logic? Given that privately funded delegations are necessarily non-official, what is it that warrants member participation in some cases but not others? Are legislators accepting private sponsorships based on comparative analyses of which destinations might be most productive, or are they accepting any offer that comes in the door? And are members of Congress maintaining a principled difference between the activities they pursue at public and private expense? The legitimacy of foreign travel depends on the answers to these questions."
