Members of Mississippi’s congressional delegation have avoided those acrimonious town hall meetings where Republican lawmakers in a few other states have been grilled by sign-toting crowds of opponents.
As a practical matter, for their own political purposes, there’s not much use in the Mississippi congressmen holding town hall meetings. All of them are likely to easily be re-elected, barring something unforeseen, the exception being Sen. Thad Cochran, who is getting to the age where he is likely to call it quits before undergoing another tough campaign like his last one. For most Mississippi incumbents, it works better to touch base at home with familiar faces at the courthouses or political party gatherings, where the questions are usually friendly and easy to answer.
A group of citizens called Action Together Oxford, however, held their own town hall meeting recently where they hoped to voice some concerns to their congressman, Rep. Trent Kelly, and U.S. Sens. Cochran and Roger Wicker.
Who knows whether any of three would have shown up anyway, but The Oxford Eagle reported that “according to their offices, all three Republicans were each traveling out of the country as members of congressional delegations. Kelly and Wicker were attending the Winter Meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Austria, while Cochran was in Cuba and Colombia.”
A couple of days after the Oxford meeting, USA Today published an in-depth article quoting the Treasury Department as reporting that congressional travel cost nearly $20 million last year, the highest figure ever recorded. Many go first class, too. Taxpayers paid for 557 trips that cost more than $10,000 for a member of Congress or a staffer. And all this doesn’t include trips on military planes.
Granted, reducing junkets for members of Congress and their staffers would be a drop in the bucket toward reducing the $20 trillion national debt. But cutting a few million here and there from congressional travel spending might offer a little symbolic relief to taxpayers. That’s especially so if you are of the opinion that the input of Wicker and Kelly won’t do a lot to enhance the security of Europe or that whatever Cochran was doing in Cuba wasn’t worth the trip unless he was going on his own dime.
