USA Today: Open-government promises too often fade into secrecy
Open-government promises too often fade into secrecy
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/03/open-government.html#more
When candidates are seeking your vote, they can be counted on to mouth civics-book pieties about the public's right to know what's going on in government. They promise to hold meetings in the open, make government records readily available and generally end excessive secrecy.
The three leading contenders for the presidency are no exception:
* Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said in a statement released Sunday she is "committed to restoring open government," both by mandating more open meetings and release of public documents and by nominating "an attorney general who has a proven commitment to open government."
* Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., pledges to "turn the page on a growing empire of classified information" and "help connect government to its citizens and engage citizens in a democracy."
* Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., says that "a democratic government operates best in the disinfecting light of the public eye," and that "ethics and transparency are not election-year buzz words; they are the obligations of democracy and the duties of honorable public service."
These are comforting words. But all too often there is a huge gap -- both in Washington and in the states -- between the promises of open government and the reality. Once elected, political leaders find it all too easy to justify a retreat to closed-door meetings and classified documents.
Clinton, for example, earned a reputation for secrecy during her husband's presidency by keeping the public in the dark as she hatchedher ill-fated health care reform proposals. As USA TODAY reported last week, records from the Clinton years are only very slowly being pried out of the archives, and then with major areas still blacked out.
As for Obama, Chicago news media have pointed out several instances in which he has been unable to produce records from his term as an Illinois state senator, his only experience in public office before 2005.
And, according to watchdog groups monitoring the subject, McCain has at times supported the continued classification of certain records from the Vietnam War, which ended more than 30 years ago.
Polls suggest the public is concerned. In a new nationwide survey released Sunday by the organizers of Sunshine Week, an open-government advocacy coalition, 74% of adults said they view the federal government as secretive, up from 62% just two years ago. Nearly 90% said they consider it important to know presidential and congressional candidates' positions on open government before they vote.
The earnest platitudes of the current campaign are little different from those of eight years ago, when Republicans seeking to win back the White House sought to capitalize on public weariness with the dissembling and stonewalling of the Clinton era.
What followed, however, was a Bush administration that could well be the most secrecy-obsessed in U.S. history, one that undercut severely the public's right to know, embodied in the 41-year-old Freedom of Information Act.
Backlogs of unanswered requests for information -- some of them lying around for more than a decade -- reached record levels. Staffing and budgets for responding to public inquires were allowed to wither, and the rules for enforcing public access to records were turned on their head.
In reaction, Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined last December to pass overwhelmingly a landmark package of major reforms. These include new monetary penalties on agencies that don't respond to freedom of information requests within 20 days; a publicly accessible tracking system for individual requests; and ways of making it easier to recover attorney's fees when citizens are forced to file suit to get records to which they are entitled.
But just weeks after he quietly signed the new law, President Bush tucked into his budget for next year an attempt to undercut one of its most important provisions. Bush's plan would wipe out the new position of a freedom-of-information ombudsman in the National Archives and move the function to the Justice Department.
This would put what is supposed to be an independent office, charged with assisting the public and mediating disputes over access to records, under the umbrella of the same department responsible for representing government officials trying to invent excuses to withhold records. These officials opposed passage of the new reform law and were the leaders in throwing up legal roadblocks to open government over the past seven years.
The move, now the subject of yet another confrontation between the administration and leading members of both parties in Congress, is just the latest example of the longstanding fight for public access to information about what government is doing.
James Madison, born 257 years ago Sunday, said self-governing people "must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." Voters should insist that the next president give them that power, not just high-minded campaign promises that don't last past Election Day.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/03/open-government.html#more
When candidates are seeking your vote, they can be counted on to mouth civics-book pieties about the public's right to know what's going on in government. They promise to hold meetings in the open, make government records readily available and generally end excessive secrecy.
The three leading contenders for the presidency are no exception:
* Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said in a statement released Sunday she is "committed to restoring open government," both by mandating more open meetings and release of public documents and by nominating "an attorney general who has a proven commitment to open government."
* Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., pledges to "turn the page on a growing empire of classified information" and "help connect government to its citizens and engage citizens in a democracy."
* Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., says that "a democratic government operates best in the disinfecting light of the public eye," and that "ethics and transparency are not election-year buzz words; they are the obligations of democracy and the duties of honorable public service."
These are comforting words. But all too often there is a huge gap -- both in Washington and in the states -- between the promises of open government and the reality. Once elected, political leaders find it all too easy to justify a retreat to closed-door meetings and classified documents.
Clinton, for example, earned a reputation for secrecy during her husband's presidency by keeping the public in the dark as she hatchedher ill-fated health care reform proposals. As USA TODAY reported last week, records from the Clinton years are only very slowly being pried out of the archives, and then with major areas still blacked out.
As for Obama, Chicago news media have pointed out several instances in which he has been unable to produce records from his term as an Illinois state senator, his only experience in public office before 2005.
And, according to watchdog groups monitoring the subject, McCain has at times supported the continued classification of certain records from the Vietnam War, which ended more than 30 years ago.
Polls suggest the public is concerned. In a new nationwide survey released Sunday by the organizers of Sunshine Week, an open-government advocacy coalition, 74% of adults said they view the federal government as secretive, up from 62% just two years ago. Nearly 90% said they consider it important to know presidential and congressional candidates' positions on open government before they vote.
The earnest platitudes of the current campaign are little different from those of eight years ago, when Republicans seeking to win back the White House sought to capitalize on public weariness with the dissembling and stonewalling of the Clinton era.
What followed, however, was a Bush administration that could well be the most secrecy-obsessed in U.S. history, one that undercut severely the public's right to know, embodied in the 41-year-old Freedom of Information Act.
Backlogs of unanswered requests for information -- some of them lying around for more than a decade -- reached record levels. Staffing and budgets for responding to public inquires were allowed to wither, and the rules for enforcing public access to records were turned on their head.
In reaction, Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined last December to pass overwhelmingly a landmark package of major reforms. These include new monetary penalties on agencies that don't respond to freedom of information requests within 20 days; a publicly accessible tracking system for individual requests; and ways of making it easier to recover attorney's fees when citizens are forced to file suit to get records to which they are entitled.
But just weeks after he quietly signed the new law, President Bush tucked into his budget for next year an attempt to undercut one of its most important provisions. Bush's plan would wipe out the new position of a freedom-of-information ombudsman in the National Archives and move the function to the Justice Department.
This would put what is supposed to be an independent office, charged with assisting the public and mediating disputes over access to records, under the umbrella of the same department responsible for representing government officials trying to invent excuses to withhold records. These officials opposed passage of the new reform law and were the leaders in throwing up legal roadblocks to open government over the past seven years.
The move, now the subject of yet another confrontation between the administration and leading members of both parties in Congress, is just the latest example of the longstanding fight for public access to information about what government is doing.
James Madison, born 257 years ago Sunday, said self-governing people "must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." Voters should insist that the next president give them that power, not just high-minded campaign promises that don't last past Election Day.
