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Senators plan D.C. junket
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Posted on Dec 21 2000
The Issue: Senators seek 902 funds to pay cost of planned Washington, D.C. junket.
Our View: Have they really secured an appointment to see President-elect Bush?
News spews out of Washington of President-Elect Bush meeting with the old guards, GOP Congressional leadership, Mr. Allen Greenspan, Cabinet organization, including preparation for the inauguration in January.
The president-elect’s schedule is fully booked, thus we seriously doubt that he’d have time to entertain junketeers from the NMI. In fact, securing an appointment isn’t our forte. Therefore, the planned meeting with the president-elect (while a good intention) must have been the usual simplistic approach of island lawmakers who just don’t an inkling of how Washington works.
The planned trip is planned to dovetail with the inauguration, an historic event that would include invitees from the global community. It is an event that traditionally extends an invitation to national governors, but then local senators must have looked at themselves in their rest room mirror and declared “We’re Invited!”
With a depleted budget, they marched over to the Lt. Governor’s Office in search of hard to-come-by funds. The Lt. Governor must have agreed in principle though we seriously doubt that he would sign-off on the proposed winter junket trip. He knows what the president-elect must deal with in an organizational meeting-filled schedule that doesn’t include junketeers from an island.
The planned trip begins to take on the shape of the last one where an egotistical senator declared he represents taxpayers. Nice try, sir! Wasn’t this the same senator who took his secretary on a recent junket trip to San Francisco and South Korea, all paid for by NMI taxpayers?
Gentlemen, you’re dealing with a public coffers that has seen nickels and dimes trickling in since three years ago. Let’s see you guard the coffers with prudence over the disoriented plan to smell the scent of the beginning of Spring in Washington. It remains your obligation to guard, with full measure, the expenditure of public funds from A-Z. Scrap the trip, it’s a junket at best, a waste of taxpayers money at worse. Si Yuus Maase`!
