Having flown a few trips home from D.C. to CA on Fridays, I have taken a few flights with my local Congressmen (Former Rep.Ose and Current Rep. Lundgren). I can tell you from experience, they don't fly home every weekend...and they're not charged with the responsibilites of the Speaker.TwinTownBisonFan wrote: I don't really know how else to explain this to you... SHE IS NOT ALLOWED TO FLY COMMERCIAL. The Capitol Police won't permit it. As for "weekly flights to the coast"... she represents California... It's her job to represent her district... which means spending time there talking with constituents and meeting with community leaders. Every single member of Congress does this... hell when the GOP ran the show... Congress ran a 3 day work week with Monday and Friday "travel days" the Dems are working 5 days a week in session... a radical change by Congressional standards.
As for CODEL's... makes sense to me to bring your family along to some of those places... mostly because if you've ever been around a member of Congress... they don't get ANY time with their families... their entire lives are booked, by someone else. You find the time to spend with them... including CODEL's... which SHE PAID FOR HER FAMILY TO GO ON.
As for changing reservations... again, it's a scheduling thing... I worked for an incumbent for about a year... you know what? we had standing plane tickets... every weekend at National Airport... sometimes my boss used them, sometimes not... depending on the schedule at the Capitol... often, we had to push the reservation to the later flight... it's part of difficulty in scheduling a member of Congress.
The people who are in Congress, by and large, and their staffs too, ARE on the job 24x7 (i assure you... having worked for them... and having tried to have a social life with the staffers)
Fact is... if it were a military flight, or a civilian flight, the scheduling would be the same... it's part of doing the job. Fact is... it's no different under Pelosi than it was under Hastert... and it is that way because of the security needs post 9/11. As for Hastert... he didn't fly back to Illinois very often... and had he not left Congress in 2007, he would likely have been defeated for reelection in 08 by Bill Foster. (who won the special election) The polling in his district (which I was privy to) found that a HUGE number of people in his district felt he had no idea what was going on the district and was out of touch. He didn't travel... mostly because he wasn't doing right by his district.
In one instance I wrote about last August, in the midst of the mortgage and banking meltdown, Pelosi flew home to host her book release party and book signing...which I'm sure kept her in touch with her constituents.
As for the family...if you read the DOD FOIA Response to Pelosi, pages 19 and 20, the DOD had to formally reject her request to take family along with her on a CODEL to a Combat Zone, and had to somewhat tersely inform her of the reasons for the impropriety of that request.
This is not just one or two incidents, this is a pattern of Pelosi's office making blanket requests to accomodate Pelosi's personal wishes, absent a governmental purpose.
As I said before...if Ms. Pelosi feels constrained by her "travel limitations", then maybe she shouldn't be Speaker.
Game set and match, my azz.