Starting Points: Child sexual abuse

Apr 14, 2010

Members Fly Free Abroad - Roll Call

Image by Vlastula via Flickr

April 13, 2010
By Paul Singer
Roll Call Staff

Members of Congress and their staff racked up almost $15 million worth of foreign travel in 2009, but Congress didn’t have to pay the tab.

Under a Korean War-era law governing Congressional foreign travel, Congress doesn’t pay for its own trips abroad, and there is no apparent limit on what the government can spend for Members’ hotels, taxicabs and room service.

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.

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 and has no spending limit attached.

The travel account dates back to a 1950s law that allowed the U.S. government to hold excess “foreign currency” in accounts around the world and use those balances to pay on-the-ground expenses of visiting Congressional delegations.

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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.

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.”

Translation: The government can use whatever funds it has lying around to pay the travel costs of Congressional delegations overseas.

This language creates two conditions that are rare in federal budgeting. First, it establishes a “permanent appropriation,” meaning Congress does not have to approve spending for its own travel each year, as it does for other Congressional budget items such as office supplies and salaries. Second, the program has no dollar limit. The language authorizes the government to spend whatever it needs to cover the cost of Congressional foreign travel, so Members of Congress never have to ask whether there is enough money left for the next trip they plan to take.

Discovering exactly what has been spent out of the account is almost impossible.

Congress regularly publishes in the Congressional Record reports of “foreign currencies and U.S. dollars utilized” for foreign travel. Last year, according to a Roll Call tally of those reports, House committees reported about $8.7 million in travel expenses, and the Senate reported a little more than $5 million in 2009.

But Roll Call was unable to find any government agency that would verify expenditures from the account or provide accounting records for prior years.

According to Congressional staff and State Department employees, the system operates this way: The Speaker of the House, the chairman of a committee, or the Majority or Minority Leader of the Senate approves a Congressional trip and asks the State Department to arrange it. The State Department makes the arrangements and bills the Congressional travel accounts — one Senate, one House — maintained by the Treasury.

If the delegation is traveling on a military airplane, the Defense Department pays those costs out of its own budget. Roll Call reported last year that the military maintains a fleet of about 375 airplanes that are used for VIP travel — including Congressional travel — and according to military records, these aircraft can cost as much as $20,000 per hour to operate. When a Congressional delegation travels in military aircraft, the cost of the travel is not included in the public disclosures.

When a CODEL uses commercial aircraft, the State Department pays for commercial travel and bills those costs to the same Congressional travel accounts, sources told Roll Call.

Several State Department sources said that other expenses that may be billed to the “foreign currency” accounts include overtime for embassy staff in the host country who work extra hours or weekends to accommodate the travelers; emergency prepaid cell phones for the travelers, programmed with local contact numbers; baggage handling fees; and extra conference rooms in the host hotel for delegation members to use as meeting space or a “control room.”

Members of a traveling Congressional delegation also receive a per diem to cover expenses, and this money also comes from the “foreign currency” fund.

The Wall Street Journal reported in March that per diems can be as much as $250 per traveler per day, and most Members simply pocket the cash or use it to go shopping for personal items.

At the end of March, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee and the House Office of Congressional Ethics alleging that “members may be illegally pocketing taxpayer funds” and requesting an investigation of the management of per diems.

Congress does not keep track of how much is spent out of the “foreign currency” accounts.

The Congressional Research Service has no record of studying the costs of Congressional foreign travel, and the Government Accountability Office has issued no reports on the matter since the mid-1980s.

Spokesmen for a half-dozen Congressional committees that have authorized foreign trips said that the State Department pays for all foreign travel.

A spokesman for the Senate Appropriations Committee said, “Overseas non-DOD funded Congressional travel is paid for through permanent and indefinite budget authority authorized in ... the International Security Assistance Act of 1978 and therefore does not require an annual appropriation.”

A Democratic leadership aide referred questions about the Congressional travel accounts to the Treasury Department and said, “The bottom line here is that these are taxpayer dollars and Members are required to disclose the costs of these trips so there is complete transparency on funds spent.”

The Treasury Department referred calls to the State Department, where officials said they did not know the source of the funds in the Congressional travel account.

The State Department also refused Roll Call’s request for a tally of how much has been spent out of the accounts over the past three years.

A 2007 State Department briefing for Congressional staff, obtained by Roll Call, says only that travel expenses “will be charged against specific congressional travel accounts held by the U.S. Treasury,” but it makes no mention of needing to check on available funds for travel.

Apr 12, 2010

Sexual abuse and the Catholic Church : The New Yorker

Image by Meneer de Braker (Akbar2) via Flickr

by Hendrik Hertzberg

On October 31, 1517, a Roman Catholic priest and theologian, Dr. Martin Luther, put the finishing touches on a series of bullet points and, legend has it, nailed the result to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany—the equivalent, for the time and place, of uploading a particularly explosive blog post. Luther’s was a protest against the sale of chits that were claimed to entitle buyers or their designees to shorter stays in Purgatory. Such chits, known as indulgences, were being hawked as part of Pope Leo X’s fund-raising drive for the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica. The “Ninety-five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” touched off a high-stakes flame war that rapidly devolved into the real thing, with actual wars, actual flames, and actual stakes. The theological clash that sundered Christendom didn’t just change the face of Western religion; it birthed the modern world.

Half a millennium later, the present agony of Catholicism is very far from being in the same league, even though the National Catholic Reporter has called it “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in Church history.” The crisis is not about doctrine, at least not directly. It’s about administration; it’s about the structure of power within the Catholic Church; it’s about the Church’s insular, self-protective clerical culture. And, of course, like nearly every one of the controversies that preoccupy and bedevil the Church—abortion, stem-cell research, contraception, celibacy, marriage and divorce and affectional orientation—it’s about sex.

It’s also about indulgence—the institutional indulgence, fitful but systemic, of the sexual exploitation of children by priests. The pattern broke into public consciousness in the United States a quarter of a century ago, when a Louisiana priest pleaded guilty to thirty-three counts of crimes against children and was sentenced to prison. Since then, there have been thousands of such cases, civil and criminal, involving many thousands of children and leading to legal settlements that have amounted to more than two billion dollars and have driven several dioceses into bankruptcy. In 1992, Richard Sipe, a Catholic psychotherapist and researcher who served for eighteen years as a priest and Benedictine monk, told a conference of victims that “the current revelations of abuse are the tip of an iceberg, and if the problem is traced to its foundations the path will lead to the highest halls of the Vatican.”

America’s liberal system of tort law, along with the enterprising reporting of journalists at newspapers like the Boston Globe, brought the problem to light earlier here than elsewhere. But it can no longer be dismissed as an epiphenomenon of America’s sexual libertinism and religious indiscipline. In Ireland, for example, where Church-run orphanages and other institutions for children are supported by the state, a government commission reported last year that the Dublin Archdiocese’s preoccupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid 1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities.

The past few years have seen a cascade of revelations from many countries, including, most recently, Germany, and in the past month the cascade has become a flood. Sipe’s prediction has come true. As Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and now as Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger appears to have been at best neglectful, at worst complicit, in minimizing and covering up specific cases of abuse that came under his supervision.

The response of the ecclesiastical powers that be, once outright denial became untenable, has all along been an unsatisfactory mixture of contrition and irritation. From Benedict on down, Church fathers have made statements of apology and shame. Awareness programs have been launched, studies have been conducted, bishops have been obliged to resign. The Pope met personally with victims of abuse during his visit to the United States, in 2008, and even his critics agree that he has taken the problem more seriously, both before and since his elevation to the throne of St. Peter, than did his predecessor, the soon-to-be-sainted John Paul II.

On the other hand, that’s not setting the bar very high. When serious discipline has been imposed, it has generally been in the wake of bad publicity, usually from outside the Church and always from outside the hierarchy. There has been a lot of bad publicity of late, and some of the reaction has been tinged with resentful paranoia. In an editorial, L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, accused “the media” of having the “rather obvious and ignoble intention of attacking Benedict XVI and his closest collaborators at all costs.” This was echoed, nearer home, by the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, who, in his blog (yes, he has one), accused the Times of “being part of a well-oiled campaign against Pope Benedict.” Back in Rome, on Palm Sunday, the Pope himself spoke darkly of “the petty gossip of dominant opinion.”

The Catholic Church is an authoritarian institution, modelled on the political structures of the Roman Empire and medieval Europe. It is better at transmitting instructions downward than at facilitating accountability upward. It is monolithic. It claims the unique legitimacy of a line of succession going back to the apostolic circle of Jesus Christ. Its leaders are protected by a nimbus of mystery, pomp, holiness, and, in the case of the Pope, infallibility—to be sure, only in certain doctrinal matters, not administrative ones, but the aura is not so selective. The hierarchy of such an institution naturally resists admitting to moral turpitude and sees squalid scandal as a mortal threat. Equally important, the government of the Church is entirely male.

It is not “anti-Catholic” to hypothesize that these things may have something to do with the Church’s extraordinary difficulty in coming to terms with clerical sexual abuse. The iniquities now roiling the Catholic Church are more shocking than the ones that so outraged Martin Luther. But the broader society in which the Church is embedded has grown incomparably freer. To the extent that the Church manages to purge itself of its shame—its sins, its crimes—it will owe a debt of gratitude to the lawyers, the journalists, and, above all, the victims and families who have had the courage to persevere, against formidable resistance, in holding it to account. Without their efforts, the suffering of tens of thousands of children would still be a secret. Our largely democratic, secularist, liberal, pluralist modern world, against which the Church has so often set its face, turns out to be its best teacher—and the savior, you might say, of its most vulnerable, most trusting communicants.