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Shadow Government #61
Secret covenants
by John A. Jackson
California politics is blessed and enlivened by the Ralph M. Brown Act. Basically, the law holds that if any unit of state or local government takes an action, it must do so in public.
No secret meetings, no secret votes. Even in areas of legitimate privacy, such as individual personnel actions and pending litigation, if the entity acts, it must do so in front of witnesses.
The California statute is not as sweeping as, for example, Florida's Sunshine Law. But for most purposes, when it is heeded, it functions quite well, particularly for reporters.
That's not all the time, of course. I cherish the anecdote about a Northern California county supervisor, who woke up during a hearing confused about the item under discussion. "Didn't we vote on that at lunch?" he asked.
The federal situation is otherwise. There is a Freedom of Information Act, but it has huge loopholes.
Consider, for instance, the Bush Administration's recent formulation of its controversial energy policy.
A task force under Vice President Dick Cheney spent months hearing testimony and then prepared a list of 150 specific recommendations, released last month, for dealing with what it called an energy crisis.
You may recall that conservation was not among those proposals, nor was any commitment to non-polluting energy sources, like wind and solar.
Instead, the Cheney task force recommended among other atrocities the construction of 1,300 new coal-fired power plants, a revival of nuclear energy and drilling or strip mining just about everywhere. It was sort of a Manhattan Plan for destroying the environment.
So the question arises: who testified before the Cheney committee? Indeed, the General Accounting Office raised the question a month ago, and renewed it formally last week.
Cheney's office refuses to say. No equivocation, just a flat-out no.
The GAO, Congress's investigative arm, can now renew its request and, if the administration does not comply, bring a civil action. What the courts will do is anyone's guess.
The public interest ought to be obvious. Did the task force hear from an appropriate range of experts? Or did persons with a financial stake in the outcome dominate its information gathering? These 150 recommendations: whose ideas are they?
Not everything would be clarified by a simple list of the participants, but a transcript of the testimony is pretty certainly not to be expected.
(Most places in California, you could at least ask for and listen to an officially made tape or video recording, and, of course, you could read the minutes.)
Arrogance about energy and the environment has been a cardinal flaw of the new Bush Administration. In a similar way, and this has to be noted, arrogance and secrecy characterized Hillary Clinton's doomed task force on national health policy.
Whether open discussions would have helped the Clinton health plan cannot be known now, but its secret formulation certainly did not inspire trust.
"Shadow Government" likes historical parallels. Let's go deep on this one.
Back in 1917, the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia discovered a trove of secret treaties that the Allies had made to divide the presumptive spoils of World War I, which was still going on.
The treaties were a hoot. Not only did they parcel out a whole lot of other peoples' territories, but the giveaways overlapped. Key provinces were often promised to several recipients. Any claim the allies had to the moral high ground vanished when Foreign Affairs Commissar L.D. Trotsky made the treaties public.
Bad as the Bush Administration is, it is unlikely to be replaced by Bolsheviks. But it might well note how the allies attempted to retake the moral lead.
American President Woodrow Wilson announced to all the world 14 points on which any war-ending treaty would be based. The first of them was: "Open covenants, openly arrived at."
Sunlight is the beginning of public health. Those who fear it, as Cheney seems to, must be suspect from the start.
John A. Jackson may be reached at TomShadwell@cs.com. ER