Foreign Travel is Part of the Job

I found myself very frustrated with the discourse over why Karen Bass was in Ghana when the fires hit…

The problem isn’t that Bass violated the promise she made about foreign travel. The problem is that the promise was foolish and irresponsible, and she never should have made it at all. Foreign travel is a major component of her job, and her pledge to avoid it has left her open to bad faith criticism.

The U.S. constitutional order reserves critical foreign-policy responsibilities for the federal government. However, the leadership of states and localities has always had duties that require engagement with the global community. This has only become more acute as networks of global trade and social integration have become an everyday reality for U.S. municipalities.

Governors and the mayors of large cities cannot avoid international politics because their constituents depend socially, culturally, and economically upon global engagement.

I will grant that the Ghana trip is a bit harder to justify from the POV of Los Angeles specifically, except insofar as it represents a contribution to the national diplomatic apparatus and a goodwill gesture to an African democracy. The bigger problem is that people interpret these trips as being “vacations” (I’m pretty sure Bass spent more time in the air to and from Ghana on a military plane than she spent on the ground), and don’t understand that it’s possible for an executive to be in close contact with an emergency response team across the entirety of the flight and the visit.