Ethics panels sets new guidelines for trips

The House ethics committee on Monday began cracking down on paperwork for power trips, imposing a new 14-day “hard” deadline for submitting requests for approval of privately sponsored travel.

The House has long barred members from accepting lobbyist-paid travel, but those rules were rarely enforced before the Abramoff scandal and a golf junket to Scotland became headline news and helped implicate former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and former Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) in the wide-ranging corruption scheme.

{mosads}Last year the House passed even more stringent rules on lobbyist-sponsored junkets, prohibiting members from accepting free trips financed “in any part by a lobbyist” or major corporation that last more than two days.

Members and staff also must seek written permission for all privately financed trips. Originally, lawmakers were supposed to submit the request forms to the ethics committee 30 days before the departure date of the planned travel. But in its pink-slip memo, released on Monday, the ethics committee said “many members and staff” have been shirking that duty, instead submitting the forms “far short of that guideline, often only a day or two prior to the start of the trip in question.”

To make matters worse, there was no good reason for the delay, the committee wrote.

“In the vast majority of cases, such belated requests are not due to any special circumstances, but instead stem merely from a failure to submit the request in a timely fashion,” ethics committee members wrote in the memo.

The panel continued to process the requests but is refusing to do so any longer. The new deadline will be effective for any trip beginning on or after Oct. 21.

The ethics committee directive comes after the New York Post reported Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) took a trip costing thousands of dollars to the Sandals Grand Resort and Spa in Antigua and Barbuda last year after the new rules had passed.

On his forms, Rangel listed the NY Carib News Foundation as the sponsor, but the Post found that several corporations financed the trip, including AT&T, HSBC, Sandals and Pfizer.

The House ethics panel is expected to consider a raft of ethics allegations against Rangel Wednesday and determine whether it will launch a formal investigation into them.