Hang around the nation’s capital long enough and inevitably even the most grizzled newsroom veteran reads something so utterly wrong that he is left speechless.
Such a moment arrived for this ink-stained wretch Thursday while reading a Washington Post op-ed by Bipartisan Policy Center President Jason Grumet. His piece included this declaration about post-Watergate reforms designed to bring government out from behind closed doors:
Here’s a news flash for the gentleman: There were at least 81,752 “deliberative moments” in the federal government last year, according to the Associated Press.
That’s how many times officials cited the infamous “deliberative process” exemption of the Freedom of Information Act to justify withholding documents sought by journalists and private citizens in 2013.
That’s the most ever such denials, which is saying something because there are only two kinds of journalists in this town: Those who have been denied FOIA requests due to the deliberative process exemption and those who will be.
In other words, federal officials can have their deliberations behind closed doors at will and not have to worry that the records of those deliberations will ever see the light of day. Grumet is erecting a straw man to justify turning off the sunshine in government.
Transparency advocates have for years recognized the deliberative process exemption as the FOIA’s Achilles Heel because it can be used to withhold every document generated prior to a decision or event.
These same advocates are cheering a bill introduced in the Senate recently by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. It’s the FOIA Improvement Act of 2014.
The Leahy-Cornyn proposal requires executive branch officials to consider whether the public interest in knowing how government actually functions outweighs the need to insure deliberative security for decision-makers.
It doesn’t repeal the exemption, in fact, it changes it not very much at all. But it is a positive step in the right direction and should be enacted.
One would expect a president who promised “the most transparent administration in history” to sign such a measure into law.
But the three paragraphs from Grumet’s oped quoted above weren’t what left this newsroom hack temporarily bereft of intelligible speech.
That moment came in reading this Grumet gem:
A USA Today/Bipartisan Policy Center poll last year found that 77 percent of the public believed that it could trust the government in Washington to do what is right ‘only some of the time’ or ‘none of the time’ — an extraordinary indictment of a broken political system.”
Either Grumet would have Americans believe that their knowing more about their government broke it or something else is responsible but they really don’t need to know what it is.
If that’s the argument for putting most government deliberations back behind closed doors, then I’d say the FOIA Improvement Act of 2014 cannot be enacted too soon.
