Will Open-Government Liberals Oppose Obama's Trashing of Union Transparency?
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
12/22/08 8:17 AM EST
Advocates of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other measures of government transparency and accountability are about to encounter an opportunity to demonstrate whether they have the courage of their convictions, courtesy of President-elect Barack Obama.
Obama and Rep. Hilda Solis, his Secretary of Labor nominee, have made clear their determination to gut the federal government's Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS). Under President George Bush and his Labor Secretary, Elaine Chao, OLMS, which was established by the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act, actually required labor unions to report basic details about their finances and how they spend member dues.
For years, under both Democrats and Republicans, the OLMS had been a bureaucratic backwater in a second-echelon cabinet department of little notice. Chao changed that, aggressively enforcing the law and in the process creating a massive database of never-before-available information about how unions spend dues money.
In the course of that initiative, OLMS turned over all kinds of rotten rocks and found corruption that resulted in hundreds of labor union officials being convicted of crimes involving mismanagement, misappropriation and fraud. Today's edition of The Wall Street Journal offers an incisive commentary on this issue.
So why is the Solis appointment an opportunity for open government advocates like OMB Watch, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, American Library Association and OpentheGovernment.org? Most of the folks running and funding these groups are political liberals whose natural instincts are pro-labor.
My guess is that Barack Obama likely received the votes of every significant official with such groups and, while their organizations wouldn't necessarily take an official position on a cabinet appointment, the officials would almost certainly be sympathetic to Solis, whose campaigns have been almost completely funded by donations from labor unions.
Therein lies the rub. Guess what was the first office visited by the AFL's representative on Obama transition team's Labor Department staff- OLMS, of course. Labor has screamed to high heaven for years protesting Chao's aggressive enforcement of financial disclosure regulations, even taking the Bush administration to court and spending millions of dollars on legal fees and management resources fighting the rules in every way possible.
And one of the first things the Democrats did after winning majority control of Congress was to pass a budget cut for OLMS.
How important is the work of OLMS? Well, besides, the hundreds of convictions the office has gained, the information contrained in the LM2 and T1 reports required for the past eight years has created a priceless, publicly available database of disclosure that can be a bulwark against the kind of corruption that is so often linked in the news with major unions like the Teamsters, SEIU and others.
Will the open government community remain silent when the Obama administration seeks to slow or stop the flow of information about how unions spend their members' dues? Or will they go through the motions of protest but actually do little or nothing more to oppose the effort?
The situation confronting the open government community now reminds of the choice confronting those of us on the conservative side who are advocates of open government and transparency in the immediate post-9/11 days when the Bush administration proposed the Patriot Act and began creating out of whole cloth new exceptions to transparency like the "Sensitive but Unclassified" category.
Conservatives like David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, spoke up clearly and strongly against such measures and joined transpartisan coalitions of open government groups to fight them.
There was a price to be paid for such opposition such as being cut-off from having access to Bush administration policy makers, but Keene, Norquist and others on the Right paid the price.
Will liberals among the open government groups be willing to pay the price in 2009?
