Friendly skies

Bad: In the last 18 months, according to the Federal Election Commission, members of Congress avoided the hassles of commercial air travel and hitched 259 cut-rate rides on corporate America’s luxurious jets.

Worse: The tobacco industry was the most accomodating, getting lawmakers where they wanted to go 84 times, followed — in descending order of pending legislation — the health-care industry, the insurance industry and so on.

Worst: Members of Congress see nothing wrong. “It’s just another perk we get,” says Rep. John Linder of Georgia, chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee and a recent guest of Air Tobacco on flights to the Super Bowl in San Diego and to the golf resorts of Pinehurst, N.C. “I don’t apologize for it.”

The deal: lawmakers and staff must pay the companies the equivalent of first-class airfare — using the taxpayer’s money, of course — to the same destination, with the convenience, luxury, camaraderie and cigars unreimbursable bonuses. If the destination is not served by commercial airlines, a charter rate is paid. In either case, the companies pick up the difference, often many thousands of dollars.

Even if these trips were limited to situations in which business execs were going from A to B (say, Washington to Palm Beach) and had an empty seat or two, such a way-too-cozy arrangement would stink to high heaven. It turns out, though, that members of Congress have become so brazen they, when needing to get from A to C (say, Washington to Palm Springs), call the companies and ask them to fire up the old Learjet just for them. The FEC found, coincidentally, that tobacoo industry jets became especially available just about the time Congress was killing tobacco legislation.

There’s so much wrong this, it’s hardly necessary to go into the laundry list of concerns citizens should have about the poisonous influence such practices have upon the legislative process. Citizens who fly in and out of medium-sized and small airports in this deregulated age also must wonder, as they languish in waiting rooms, whether cancelled flights, circuituous routes and excessive fares would be so prevalent if Rep. Linder were languishing with them.