A new report from the Center for Public Integrity suggests that America owes the lobbying industry a vote of thanks. It turns out, the report, says, that lawmakers and their staffers have accepted $50 million in travel in the course of five and a half years. That money apparently buys you a total of 81,000 vacation days, or 222 years of time spent by staff members and legislators beyond the Beltway and away from where they can harm the Republic.

Too bad it wasn’t more. Over the past five and a half years, Congress has passed an anti-free-trade farm bill, a gas-price-hiking energy bill, a steel tariff, and restrictions on free speech. Spending has shot through the roof. Oh, and did we mention the highway bill? Given what the members and their aides get up to when they’re in the nation’s capital, we’re all safer when they’re on a golf course in Scotland or at a beach in Florida.

Most critics of lobbyist-financed travel aver that congressmen do need to get out of the office once in a while. Congressmen benefit from seeing the world they’re regulating. Yet, even though good-government types rail against supposed pleasure trips like that infamous golf junket, it’s usually difficult to tell when the constitutional right to petition the government lets off and vacationing begins.

Then there’s the question of who should pay. In the report, a lobbyist with Public Citizen, Craig Holman, suggested that if congressional travel has educational merit, taxpayers should fund it. “The abuses are so egregious and so wide spread that it’s just cleaner and easier to prohibit private travel altogether,” Mr. Holman harrumphed. We suspect otherwise. Were such a system in place, we would see only increased demands for creative aides advancing ever more novel ways to justify spending the public dime on travel.

The very fact that the private sector funded these trips clears them of scandal. Private companies, trade associations, and even lobbyists, have, last we checked, a right to spend their money as they please, even if that involves showering $50 million in travel on our legislators. Many of those who caterwaul about lobbying are also increasingly convinced that this behavior will cost congressional Republicans their seats in the fall. They think voters won’t stand for it. That’s precisely the point – the voters will be the arbiters of congressional behavior. So why rush, via so-called lobbying reform, to abridge the right to petition?