Editorial: Congress lavished with free junkets

Public Citizen, a public interest research group, reported last week that the nuclear power industry paid $81,421 for members of Congress and their staffs to visit Las Vegas and Yucca Mountain, the proposed site of a high-level nuclear waste dump.

Powerful interest groups don't provide these trips out of philanthropy. The trips are handed out to reward supporters or lure those sitting on the fence to come around to their way of thinking. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the Nuclear Energy Institute paid more than $6,000 for one of the most strident supporters of dumping nuclear waste in Nevada -- Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho -- to visit Las Vegas and Yucca Mountain with two of his staffers.

It's bad enough that the process to select a nuclear waste dump is so biased. It's terrible that interest groups, including the nuclear power industry, are allowed to buy the support of members of Congress through these junkets disguised as "fact-finding" trips.

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