How Do You Handle a Hungry Man?

By Ken Silverstein

We recently reported that friends and relatives of GOP congressman Curt Weldon of Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, have an easier time than the average person finding a job. We’ve subsequently done further research, and it turns out that Weldon—who was elected to Congress in 1987 and currently serves as Vice Chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee—seems to have an expansive view regarding the use of his campaign funds.

Over the past eight years, Weldon has spent about $80,000 of campaign treasury funds—donated money that congressional ethics rules say should be used for “bona fide campaign or political purposes”—on restaurant meals. His dining choices range from high-end establishments like The Monocle, a Capitol Hill restaurant popular with lawmakers and lobbyists, to the humble Cracker Barrel. During the same period Weldon also dropped about $30,000 on hotels.

Take January 3, 1999: less than two months after winning reelection with 72 percent of the vote and 22 months away from his next election, Weldon spent $435.39 in campaign funds at the Capitol Grille in Washington. (The Grille’s website bears the slogan: “Remind yourself why you work so hard.”) Then, during the summer and early fall of 1999, still more than a year from election day, Weldon put down $400 of campaign funds on five meals in Wildwood, New Jersey, where he then owned a beach house. Three of those meals were on the weekend.

Weldon has drawn from his campaign funds for a number of other seemingly unusual expenditures. He spent $1,698 for a personal computer, delivered to his home, and several hundred dollars in Budapest, Moscow, and at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Oslo—all highly unusual campaign stops for a man representing a district in eastern Pennsylvania. In Atlantic City he spent $502 at The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa and $405.61 at the Taj Mahal. Add to that $4,618 paid for landscaping to a company owned by a campaign contributor and some $13,000 in unitemized personal reimbursements.

Weldon shows no sign of slowing his spending pace. His most recent filing shows that he dined four times at The Monocle between October 14, 2005, and November 17, 2005, running up a tab of $495.

Weldon’s office did not return phone calls, but his attorney, William B. Canfield, defended the congressman’s spending habits. He said that ethics rules are “entirely amorphous,” adding “you may think it’s a big loophole, but he’s allowed to spend money that way.”

Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called that a legitimate legal defense but insisted that Weldon’s spending spree violates the spirit of the rules. “Just because you’re not going to get prosecuted doesn’t mean you should do it,” she said. “He’s clearly skating the line.”

Weldon looks to be especially generous in using campaign money to treat himself to dinner, but he’s not alone. The American Prospect recently found another Pennsylvanian, Republican Senator Rick Santorum, spending political cash for a host of suspect items, including 66 trips to Starbucks, mostly in his hometown of Leesburg. Of course, neither Weldon, Santorum, nor their peers seem worried about making liberal use of campaign donations, and that’s because the Congressional Ethics Committees (or the “Member Protection Committees,” as one watchdog once described them to me) are not about to stop the gravy train.

That said, Weldon may soon need to start spending his campaign funds actually campaigning. Retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Joe Sestak is vying for Weldon’s seat, and he’s proving to be a formidable challenger. That’s bad news for Weldon. According to The Hill newspaper, by March he had only $266,102 in campaign funds raised. And the congressman has made some questionable moves in recent years—like in 2004, when he was caught attending the crowning of Reverend Sun Myung Moon as “savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent” at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, or more recently, when he suggested that Sestak should not have sent his four-year-old daughter, who has brain cancer, to a hospital outside of Pennsylvania. It’s going to cost a few advertising dollars to smooth those things over, and you have to wonder if Weldon now regrets spending some of those dollars on a trip to Cracker Barrel.

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