In a reiteration of just about everything we cover here at Sunlight, Congressional Quarterly released a terrific article examining the many ways in which Congress is not transparent and open. If you read the blog here, or are familiar with Sunlight’s work, these problems will be very familiar:

• Bills are often dropped hours before a vote. With no time to read the bills, large programs get voted on with little review from lawmakers and no review from the public. In one egregious case, lawmakers went scurrying for information on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, legalizing domestic spying programs, as the final version of the bill was not available when the vote was held.
• Some committees are secret, some are open. Sometimes a bill can travel through multiple committees with varying degrees of transparency.
• Conference committees are supposed to be open, but openness is often circumvented or multiple conferences are held, some open, some not.
• Congressional Research Service reports, the information pipeline for most congressional offices, are not widely, publicly available.
• There is a large amount of over-classification of legislative activities related to defense and intelligence.

And so it goes. Congress still has leaps and bounds to make towards true transparency. Over the past two years, there have been some encouraging developments including the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the rewriting of franking restrictions for lawmaker web use, and the voluntary transparency of some individual lawmakers.

One thing that does stand out in this article that needs to be challenged is the suggestion that transparency could cause greater disapproval of Congress:

Lawmakers in the 1970s reasoned that more openness could benefit not just voters, but Congress itself. That isn’t necessarily true, said Princeton’s Zelizer, thanks to 19th Century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s saying that the two things no one should want to see being made are sausage and legislation.

“It might not result in better ratings for Congress,” the professor said. “They thought, ‘If you make it more open, people will like it more.’ That actually didn’t happen.”

Zelizer, one of my favorite congressional experts, isn’t wrong here, but his lessons don’t necessarily apply to transparency as conceived of in the Internet-powered 21st century. While the reformers of the ’60s and ’70s did believe that openness would build trust with the public, they did not build interactivity and connectivity into that push for openness. Transparency, different from openness, proposes that information should not just be available and accessible, but that the public should be able to freely interact with both the information and all actors involved, including lawmakers, staffers, and other members of the general public. Unlike simply making information available, transparency would go a long way to help repair the image of Congress by actually connecting and involving citizens.

To see what this transparency could look like read my colleague Greg Elin’s excellent review of the interactivity at change.gov, the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition web site.

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With the Bush Administration winding down, ProPublica asks a good question, “What documents can the White House put in the shredder?” The administration’s fetish for secrecy is well known. It’s a logical assumption that the Bush/Cheney team would like to make some documents disappear.

ProPublica looked at the laws governing what documents they are required to save, starting with the Presidential Records Act. Congress passed it in 1978 as a result of Watergate and the struggle over Nixon’s papers and records. The law requires all records be preserved that documents the president and the vice’s “activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties.” The law does not require that personal and political records, or “superfluous” documents be saved. Outgoing administrations are to turn over presidential and vice presidential records to the National Archives, which catalogs them and is to make them available to the public after 12 years.

In 2001, however, the Bush issued an executive order, the infamous No. 13233, requiring current and former presidents and vice presidents to authorize the release of their papers. With the stroke of a pen, he gave himself and the other presidents, vice presidents, and even their heirs the ability to keep documents secret. Earlier this fall, Slate listed this executive order as number one of the 10 orders the new president should toss out. Obama has promised (pdf) to “nullify the Bush order and establish procedures to ensure the timely release of presidential records.”

Let’s hope that historians, journalists and other sleuths will be able to thwart the Bush/Cheney veil of secrecy when they get access their papers in a dozen years or so.

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Noted curmudgeon David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, yesterday issued a disobliging statement towards the cause of transparency. In heralding his work in crafting a 357-page appropriations super-package in secret Obey launched his defense to Bloomberg, “You’re damn right it has [been done in secret] because if it’s done in the public it would never get done.”

Were the bill done in an open process, colleagues may waste time “pontificating.” Perhaps, they may also consider “reading,” or “understanding,” this $600 billion bill. Lawmakers may even consider “knowing what they’re voting on.” But, of course, who are the elected representatives of government to decide how $600 billion is allocated? They should just follow the dictates of their party leadership on how to vote.

Of course, as the Wisonsinite Obey waved his paw at the notion of openness the Rules Committee met to approve the bill. Not seen by many lawmakers, the bill reported out of the Committee at 7:11 pm last night. And guess what’s on the suspension calendar for voting today? That’s right! Obey’s 357-page, $600 billion appropriations bill.

Ready those stopwatchs and start reading … now. Can you finish this bill before it’s time to vote? Say, 5 o’clock.

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The House appears to be on the ball in pushing back against the kind of executive branch secrecy that Ellen wrote about here. Just a couple of hours ago they passed a bill, H.R. 6575, the Over-Classification Reduction Act, by voice vote. The stated purpose of the bill is to “increase Governmentwide information sharing and the availability of information to the public by applying standards and practices to reduce improper classification.” Now if only the Senate could get on board and pass the numerous anti-secrecy bills passed out of the House.

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OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of organizations (including Sunlight) aimed at promoting transparency in the federal government, released their fifth annual Secrecy Report Card. The report shows that the federal government is increasingly conducting its business in the dark.  This is especially true of the executive branch lead by an administration whose obsession with secrecy surpasses that of even Richard Nixon. “The current administration continues to refuse to be held accountable to the public,” said Patrice McDermott, the coalition’s executive director. As the report says:

The administration of President George W. Bush has over its seven and one half years to date exercised unprecedented levels not only of restriction of access to information about federal government’s policies and decisions, but also of suppression of discussion of those policies and their underpinnings and sources. It continues to refuse to be held accountable to the public through the oversight responsibilities of Congress. We have been made less secure as a result and the open society on which we pride ourselves has been undermined and will take hard work to repair.

Restoring openness and accountability is key to winning back the trust of the public, Patrice said in a press release. “In recent years, polls have shown that a growing number of Americans believe the federal government is secretive-terrible news for our democracy,” she said.

(more…)

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