Lawfare‘s Ryan Scoville comments on the travel habits of Congress people, including staff. I found this chart, covering the destinations of the travelers for privately funded trips, to be quite interesting:
Figure 3 shows the total number of privately funded visits to each of the top ten destinations. With nearly 1,400 visits from 2011 to 2016, Israel easily led the way and accounted for nearly a third of all of the 4,400 trips that occurred within the reporting period. Turkey was also quite high with roughly 750 visits, but other countries trailed far behind. In all, House members and staff traveled to 113 different countries.The leading destinations seem significant as plausible indicia of congressional priorities and expertise. I imagine that, all else equal, members of Congress are more likely to appreciate the complexities of U.S. foreign relations with the countries they’ve visited. I also suspect that legislators and staff are more likely to return to the United States with greater sympathy for the policies advanced by the governments of host countries. The implication is that many members of Congress may now be particularly knowledgeable about and sympathetic toward Israel and Turkey, not necessarily because of constituent preferences or abstract ideas about the importance of U.S. relations with those countries, but at least partly because of the travel itself, which has placed members and staff in close contact with government officials, the public, and economic and political conditions in Israel and Turkey.
Israel is understandable, but I was surprised by Turkey.
Sponsor identities seem significant in the sense that they suggest the purposes of the underlying travel. AIEF, a charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC, funds delegations to promote support for Israel within Congress, while the Turkish Coalition of America and the Turkic American Federation of the Midwest do likewise with respect to Turkey. The Aspen Congressional Institute offers nonpartisan programs of education on matters of international concern. The Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE), an international humanitarian organization, appears to use the trips to promote foreign aid.
This is a article written from the outside perspective, so Ryan offers no concrete reasons for the visits. As Turkey’s turn towards authoritarianism, not yet complete, is very recent there’s no reflection of the event in the data – it’ll be interesting to see how that changes over the next couple of years.
