It seems like only yesterday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were promising “the most open and honest Congress ever” in American history.
Reid and Pelosi – as well as President Barack Obama – have flooded the airwaves in recent years with fine-sounding words extolling transparency in government, but their actions on the $787 billion economic stimulus package prove the hollowness of their talk.
Somebody, someday – probably an out-of-work newspaper journalist – will write the definitive “Gucci Gulch” edition of the story behind passage of this legislative monstrosity.
One indicator of the author’s intellectual honesty will be how prominently he or she features the friction between Reid and Pelosi following the dead-of-night conference report written behind closed doors by the Democratic leaders and their key staffers (and advised by certain members of the lobbying community).
Pelosi blew her top when Reid announced a deal was at hand and demanded a “briefing” on the details. Later, she explained that “we wanted to see it in writing and when we did that, then we were able to go forward.”
Why did Pelosi want it in writing? Because, she said, “around here language means a lot. Words weigh a ton and one person’s understanding of a spoken description might vary from another’s.”
Apparently, Pelosi missed the rank hypocrisy of complaining about decisions made without her seeing them in writing beforehand because shortly thereafter, she and her colleagues in the congressional Democratic leadership blithely ignored the unanimously adopted instruction by the full House that no vote be taken before the conference report was publicly available for 48 hours.
She doesn’t think it’s at least as important that the people she works for also have an opportunity to see beforehand and in writing what’s being proposed to be done with their hard-earned tax dollars?
At one point, Republican Study Committee chairman Rep. Tom Price, R-GA, stood outside Pelosi’s office while the conference report was being written, laughing sardonically because the official conference committee was scheduled to convene at 3:00 that afternoon. He knew the real work was going on behind the Speaker’s door and the afternoon meeting was a masquerade for the cameras.
Considering how Democrats like Pelosi and others on the Left screamed to high heaven whenever President George W. Bush acted against the public’s right to know (a not-infrequent occurrence, to be sure), one might now expect to hear similar protests as Democrats in Congress make a mockery of their transparency promises. One would be wrong.
When a GOP Hill staffer noted in a post on a non-partisan listserv read by transparency advocates across the ideological spectrum that the only voices of protest were conservatives, a Democrat poster snarkily suggested he take his comments elsewhere.
That reminded me of a familiar scene from the Bush years when the White House refused to reveal who the Cheney energy task force had met with before issuing its policy recommendations.
Some of us on the Right protested, noting Hillary Clinton’s similar refusal to make public who her national health care panel met with in 1993. But most on the Right kept quiet, fearful of creating problems for the Bush White House or the GOP majority on the Hill.
And 9/11 made it even more difficult to rouse folks on the Right against increased official secrecy, even when it was or clearly could be used to shield government from minimal accountability.
Notable exceptions here included, among others, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform, Paul Jacobs of term limit fame, and the National Taxpayers Union. (Odds are very good that I’ve missed some important people who should be listed here. I can only plead advancing age and receding memory).
They understood what too many GOPers still don’t – transparency and accountability are the first line of defense against Big Government, not a mere rhetorical after-thought to be summoned as a round of ammunition against Democrats.
So the Democrats are running Washington now, and for many activists on the Left it means nothing should get in the way of enacting their party’s progressive agenda. There are some notable exceptions here, too, such as Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation – an organization I greatly admire – who has decried this Potemkin tide of accommodation.
“This is a dangerous practice that the Democrats ran against in 2006 … The majority Democrats should maintain their previous position on running the most open and honest government by allowing the public to review this legislation. Anything less is unacceptable,” he wrote on Sunlight’s blog.
There’s a man who clearly recognizes a false front when he sees it.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapcott’s Copy Desk blog on dcexaminer.com.
