Rep. Bud Shuster has had no opponents in five of his last six elections, but the 13-term Pennsylvania Republican still spends as much or more than candidates in tough races, the Philadelphia Inquirer said Sunday.
Federal Election Commission records show that Shuster’s campaign spent about $3.6 million during a 12-year period ending with his last re-election in 1996, the newspaper said. Relatively little of that money went to advertising, campaign literature and polling. Plenty was spent on limousines, chartered planes, Broadway shows, restaurants and hotels, the newspaper reported.
It gave details of amounts spent by Shuster on a holiday-season visit to New York City in 1995 at theaters, hotels, a restaurant and a nightclub. All but $533 in air fares and $147 for a limousine were expensed as “political meetings,” the Inquirer said.
In the election year that followed, Shuster had no primary challenger from his party and crushed his Democratic opponent 74 percent to 26 percent. The newspaper said Shuster, 65, who chairs the House Transportation Committee, had reported many campaign expenditures as fundraising events or political meetings, which are allowed under FEC rules.
The Altoona, Pa., congressman is facing a probe by the House Ethics Committee, which has received complaints about his relationship with a former chief of staff who resigned in 1994 and later became a congressional lobbyist earning $1.5 million a year.
The Inquirer said federal prosecutors also are examining his role as House Transportation chairman in Boston’s highway tunnel construction project known as “the Big Dig.”
No comment was available from Shuster’s Washington office.
