(RNS) — Over the past four-and-a-half years, private organizations spent nearly $570,000 flying members of Congress and their families around the globe on religion-related trips, putting them up in hotels and feeding them, a study of congressional records shows.
An analysis of congressional trips by Medill News Service in partnership with American Public Media’s “Marketplace” program and American RadioWorks found that private interests spent about $14.4 million since Jan. 1, 2000, to send House and Senate members on more than 4,800 trips of all sorts.
The study identified at least 185 congressional trips sponsored by churches, religious groups and nonprofit organizations seeking to educate or influence members of Congress on religious issues. Those trips made up less than 4 percent of the total number of trips during that period.
Nonetheless, religion-related trips still sent lawmakers around the globe. One example is Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican.
Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Middle East and Central Asia subcommittee and a senior member of the International Relations Committee, said trips to faraway places help her and colleagues make better decisions in Congress.
Between Aug. 18 and Sept. 2, 2001, Ros-Lehtinen strung together four trips paid for by different private organizations that cost a total of $44,971. She went from Miami to Tel Aviv, then to South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore, all underwritten.
Ros-Lehtinen first flew to Israel with her husband, Dexter, and her daughters, Amanda and Patricia. While there, Ros-Lehtinen flew by helicopter to the foot of Masada and to the Golan Heights.
“Traveling to Masada and the Golan Heights afforded me the opportunity to witness the factors that affect Israel’s security and the imminent threats that are a daily reality for Israel,” she said.
Ros-Lehtinen represents a heavily Jewish district in Miami and has successfully courted the Jewish vote through steadfast support of Israel. The summer 2001 trip was sponsored by the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah, a group dedicated to educating world leaders about Jewish contributions to civilization.
Other legislators’ passports were stamped in Cuba, England, Finland, Lebanon, Mexico, Jordan, Spain, Syria and Ukraine. In addition, they made trips across the United States to conduct fact-finding missions, make speeches and participate in conferences on religious issues. The cost of each trip averaged more than $3,000.
Most churches cannot afford that kind of extravagance. But two nonprofit organizations picked up the slack. Combined, the Aspen Institute’s $351,000 and the Faith & Politics Institute’s $57,000 covered nearly three-fourths of the total spent on religion-related trips during that period.
The Washington-based Aspen Institute is a nonprofit organization founded in 1950 that aims “to foster enlightened leadership, the appreciation of timeless ideas and values, and open-minded dialogue on contemporary issues.”
Aspen held congressional conferences on political Islam the last three years in Mexico, Finland and Spain to educate legislators on the political influence of Islam and discuss the future of the Middle East region.
Participants discussed topics like fundamentalist Islam’s distaste for Western democracies and the importance of democratization throughout the Middle East, with a special focus on Iran.
Institute spokeswoman Jamie Miller said the conferences are designed to take legislators far from their familiar political arena so they can focus on the issue at hand.
“All politics is basically removed,” Miller said. “The point is isolation and study — not necessarily going to the place that the subject is about.”
Legislators do have an opportunity for recreation as part of the institute’s effort to foster a comfortable environment, Miller said. With conferences on a variety of topics held throughout the Caribbean, Europe and the Pacific, comfort is not hard to come by.
The other major religion-related trip sponsor concentrates its trips south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The Washington-based Faith & Politics Institute immerses members of Congress in the emotions and historic sites of the civil rights movement. The centerpiece of a weekend trip to the South is a walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where police with dogs attacked peaceful civil rights marchers in 1965.
Glenda Hope, executive director of San Francisco Network Ministries, accompanied her friend Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., on one of those trips.
The institute paid for Woolsey’s trip, but Hope had to pay her own way because of ethics rules that allow trip sponsors to pay only the expenses of one member of a legislator’s family.
They traveled on a chartered plane from Washington to Alabama with 20 members of Congress, their spouses and staff, and representatives of the institute’s corporate sponsors.
The group went to the 16th Street Baptist Church, site of the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing that killed four young black girls in Sunday school. They rode in buses, sang songs of the movement and visited a variety of civil rights sites.
While one representative of each of the institute’s corporate sponsors is allowed on the trip, they are prohibited from lobbying legislators while traveling, said Grace Cummings, the institute’s executive director. She said that doesn’t mean lobbyists can’t use the trip to advantage later on.
“In Washington, part of what lobbyists do is simply build relationships amongst people, and there’s definitely relationship-building going on, but there’s not a lot of discussion of policy expressly because that’s not what we do,” Cummings said. “It’s got an impact, no doubt about it, because you’ve all been emotionally involved in something.”