Leahy speech opens Sunshine in Government week

Every year, on the third week of March, advocates of open government celebrate Sunshine Week around the March 16th birthday of President James Madison. One of Congress' top lawmakers in the realm of the Freedom of Information Act says there is a lot of work to do in beefing up one of the most important open government laws.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is one of the last of the Watergate-era lawmakers elected to Congress still on Capitol Hill. As chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, he has a appropriate seat from which to guide what he considers a very important, and ongoing battle to champion the rights of openness in government, which he says date back beyond the era of the Watergate break-in.

The greatest lesson of that was that open and transparent government is the best antidote to the abuse of power, actually, the best guardian of the people's rights. It's been mentioned that today is James Madison's birthday. He said that "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance." And that "people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives."

The right to know is a cornerstone of democracy. No democracy exists unless the people know what the government is doing in their name. If you're kept in the dark about key policy decisions that affect your lives, then that democracy fails. Without access to public documents and a vibrant free press, officials can make decisions in the shadows, and often in collusion with special interests, they can escape accountability for their actions. And once eroded, the right to know is very hard to win back. So if knowledge is power, then the Freedom of Information Act is the power cord that connects the American people to their government.

Leahy told the FOIA Day Celebration, sponsored by the Collaboration on Government Secrecy and the American University's Washington School of Law, that he was pleased to see that money to get the Office of Government Information Services off and running at the National Archives was part of the huge stimulus bill passed several weeks ago.

He also told his audience of government FOIA officials and representatives from "good government" groups that he urged President Obama, as part of his transition, to strengthen FOIA. The Vermont Democrat says it "wasn't a hard sell", since the President, as a Senator from Illinois, backed virtually all of Leahy's proposals regarding FOIA during his term as a senator.

Leahy also spoke of a recent huge victory for FOIA: the partial release, also several weeks ago, of memorandums by the Justice Department outlining the legal justification for policy decisions made or contemplated by the Bush Administration.

I had subpoenaed these (documents). They had been stonewalled by the last administration, we got part of it, we knew it was there. The new administration opened the doors and showed it to us. Two particularly shocking memos that suggested the suspension of First Amendment rights and press freedoms, and Fourth Amendment protections against searches and seizures.

It's amazing, and it's always a temptation of government, when they want to get something done, they always run up against that pesky document, the Constitution. And, "if we'll just set it aside just this one time, because it is so important, because of terrorism, or war, or financial crisis, just this once!"

If we allow that, then democracy fails. And FOIA is so important to that.

Leahy adds that the now-publicized Justice Department memos underscore his feeling that in government, "you can't do this kind of thing in the dark."

For feds who disparage the FOIA as an inconvenient nuisance to those working in the government, Leahy has this to say:

We know that when FOIA has been used right, and by used right, I mean when government has allowed it to be used right, its been an indispensible tool for shedding light on bad government policies, and helping guarantee the public's right to know.

Leahy says this week, he will join again with Sen. John Cornyn (R.-Texas) to re-introduce a bill which he says will make, "more transparent the exemptions to FOIA created by new bills introduced in the Congress." He told the conference that the "Leahy-Cornyn Open FOIA Act" will require that when Congress provides a statutory exemption to FOIA, "it must state its intention to do so explicitly and clearly in the bill. No more, 'and this is not open to FOIA'."

He says that many of the current exemptions to FOIA are buried in the lines of text in appropriations and authorization bills, and the hope is that the Open FOIA act will discourage such "hidden" exemptions.

Leahy also says he continues to press for a "commission of Inquiry" similar in scope and mission to the 9/11 commission, to get to the truth of other questionable, and possibly illegal policy decisions made by the previous administration.

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On the Web:
American University - Collaboration on Government Secrecy (Washington College of Law)
Senator Patrick Leahy - leahy.senate.gov

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