James Gibney, Columnist

Duncan Hunter’s Real Crime Is the Jones Act

U.S. taxpayers and consumers pay the price for a century-old law that deserves to die.

September 4, 2018 at 12:00 PM UTC

James Gibney is an editor for Bloomberg Opinion. Previously an editor at the Atlantic, the New York Times, Smithsonian, Foreign Policy and the New Republic, he was also in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1989 to 1997 in India, Japan and Washington.

Some very foreign shipping.
Photographer: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

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A $14,000 family vacation in Italy. Zipline rides for $399. Tickets to see “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” for $704. Dozens, if not hundreds, of purchases of groceries and sundries and meals out. The breadth of transactions in the 47-page indictment against Representative Duncan Hunter for allegedly tapping more than $250,000 in campaign funds for personal use is matched only by their banality.

Hunter, who has been stripped of his chairmanship of the House Subcommittee on the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation and other positions, will yet have his day in court. But as an ardent champion of a rather obscure law involving U.S. commercial shipping called the Jones Act, he’s already guilty of fleecing U.S. taxpayers and consumers.