{"id":526311,"date":"2010-04-13T12:09:38","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T16:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignforliberty.com\/blog.php?view=34572"},"modified":"2010-04-13T12:09:38","modified_gmt":"2010-04-13T16:09:38","slug":"congress-flies-free-overseas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/526311","title":{"rendered":"Congress Flies Free Overseas"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tim Shoemaker<\/p>\n

Paul Singer, writing for Roll Call<\/a><\/em>, has an interesting article this morning that should be raising some eyebrows.  Thanks to a Korean War-era law regarding Congressional travel, members of Congress and their staff are able to travel abroad without footing the bill.<\/p>\n

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When a Congressional committee holds a field hearing in Wisconsin or a Member of Congress flies to a conference in Arkansas with a few staff members, those travel costs are paid for out of the annual budgets of either the committee’s or the Member’s office.<\/p>\n

But when a Congressional delegation travels overseas, the accommodations are made by the State Department and billed back to a government account that automatically refills itself<\/strong> and has no spending limit attached.  [emphasis added]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So you may ask, where does this ‘magical’ account receive its funds from?  Good question…<\/p>\n

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For years, the Treasury Department used revenues from sales of grain abroad or the income from foreign assistance loans to pay for Congressional travel, but in 1977 the U.S. comptroller general ruled that practice out of bounds.<\/p>\n

So Congress amended the provision in 1978 to establish that “whenever local currencies owned by the United States are not otherwise available” to pay for local travel costs, “the Treasury shall purchase such local currencies as may be necessary for such purposes, using any funds in the treasury not otherwise appropriated.”<\/p>\n

Translation: The government can use whatever funds it has lying around to pay the travel costs of Congressional delegations overseas.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You will definitely want to read the rest<\/a> to find out just how well some of our “public servants” are living when they travel abroad… How does $250 ‘petty cash’ per traveler per day sound?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tim Shoemaker Paul Singer, writing for Roll Call, has an interesting article this morning that should be raising some eyebrows.  Thanks to a Korean War-era law regarding Congressional travel, members of Congress and their staff are able to travel abroad without footing the bill. When a Congressional committee holds a field hearing in Wisconsin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3999,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-526311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3999"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}