By Cliff Montgomery – Aug. 20th, 2012
If you’ve been concerned with the unwarranted secrecy which surrounds Congressional lawmaking, it perhaps should be mentioned that some Senators and House members have long been upset about it too.
The thorny matter of a supposedly democratic process shrouded in secrecy was the subject of this little known federal report released last year.
Below, The American Spark quotes from the study’s introduction:
“ ‘If the work of legislation can be done shrouded in secrecy and hidden from the public,’ said former Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill, ‘then we are eroding the confidence of the public in ourselves and in our institution.’
“Open government is essential in a democratic system if Congress is to maintain public support and if its decisions are to gain popular acceptance and legitimacy. Through open chamber and committee proceedings, citizens are better able to evaluate, and hold accountable, the performance of Congress and its Members.
“In the view of one Senator: ‘I believe the more people are aware of what we are doing in the Senate and the Congress or in Washington generally, the more accountable we are. The more accountable we are, the better job we will do.’
“Compared with the White House, the executive branch, and the Supreme Court, the U.S. Congress is the most transparent national governmental institution. The House and Senate are highly visible, permeable, and accessible institutions. As a representative body whose Members are elected to serve and act on behalf of their constituents, Congress should be the most public governing entity.
“House and Senate floor proceedings, for example, are covered gavel-to-gavel over C-SPAN (the Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network), which also airs many committee hearings and markups and even an occasional conference committee.
“Since the 1970s, both legislative chambers have changed their procedures and practices to promote greater transparency. For example, setting aside the aforementioned C-SPAN coverage of the House (since 1979) and Senate (since 1986), the legislature employs technology to make an array of congressional materials (bills, committee reports, floor amendments, etc.) available electronically to the general public.
“Lawmakers also use a variety of online tools to more effectively engage and communicate with their constituents. House and Senate committees have publicly accessible websites. The House even has a Congressional Transparency Caucus that, among other things, suggests further openness initiatives for the legislative branch.
“Moreover, given the plethora of contemporary communication outlets (the Internet, cable television, blogs, and so on), people have many ‘windows’ through which to observe the workings of Congress.
“The ease of sharing information technologically also may create public expectations for more congressional openness and transparency.
“The attentive public, in short, has numerous electronic gateways to Capitol Hill.
“In addition, there are scores of journalists, outside groups, think tanks, and academics who produce a huge amount of information and analysis about Congress.
“So much material is publicly available about Congress that at least three significant issues merit a brief mention:
- the accuracy, credibility, and reliability of the material,
- information overload, given the voluminous amount of legislative materials available to the public, much of which might be irrelevant (that is, distinguishing the wheat from the chaff),
- and the quality, timeliness, or clarity of the reasons for denying public access to, or the withholding of information about, closed-door legislative activities or meetings.
“At bottom, it behooves voters, the media, relevant interest groups, and others to hold Congress to high standards of transparency, which includes making legislative materials available online in easily searchable categories. Transparency implies not just increased online access to information, but also the reasoning of the principal actors as to why legislative decisions were made, or not made.
“Typically, much of this reasoning is made public during House and Senate floor debate, as well as in other venues (committee hearings, press conferences, etc.).
“Openness is fundamental to representative government. The basic premise of transparency is that it increases the opportunity for responsive, responsible, and attributable decision making. Yet the congressional process is replete with activities and actions that are private and not observable by the public. As a Senator observed, ‘A lot goes on unseen on how we operate in this chamber.’
“How to distinguish what might be viewed as reasonable legislative secrecy from impractical transparency is a topic that arouses disagreement on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Why? Because lawmaking is critical to the governance of the nation. To produce an act of Congress involves Members and many other relevant actors who come together—meeting and talking publicly and privately—to craft policies that they believe promote and serve the national interest.
“Both secrecy and transparency suffuse the lawmaking process. The two are not ‘either/or’ constructs – they overlap constantly during the various policy-making stages.
“The objectives of this report, then, are four-fold:
- first, to outline briefly the historical and inherent tension between secrecy and transparency in the congressional process
- second, to review several common and recurring secrecy/transparency issues that emerged again with the 2011 formation of the Joint Select Deficit Reduction Committee
- third, to identify various lawmaking stages that typically include closed door proceedings
- and fourth, to close with several summary observations.”
