It can happen here
Jan 4th, 2008 by JamieB
If the national government, whose current leadership is hardly known for its commitment to open government can do it, so can Pennsylvania.
What is it?
Pass open-records reform legislation and get it signed into law.
No one knew for sure whether President Bush would sign the Open Government Act of 2007 – and the White House wasn’t saying – until he did so, without comment, on the last day of the year.
Amid a flurry of negotiating before the bill was acceptable to the White House, one important provision did not survive – the presumption of openness that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had nullified with a post-911 order to lean against releasing information due to national security concerns.
The House had included a provision to reverse Ashcroft’s order, but that did not make it through the Senate and into the law . . . prompting Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy to note, “Whatever records that a government agency was legally entitled to withhold before enactment of the ‘OPEN Government Act’ can still be withheld now that the President has signed it.”
This is no small setback, particularly when considered in the light of the long fight to “flip the presumption” on open records in Harrisburg.
Still, it is worth noting that the Open Government Act of 2007 had broad and deep support that ran the gamut from right to left on the political spectrum. Sponsored in the Senate by Patrick Leahy, the liberal Democrat from Vermont, and John Cornyn, the conservative Republican from Texas, the bill counted among its co-sponsors Thomas Coburn, the very conservative Republican from Oklahoma who has made a name for himself – and made himself unpopular with many of his colleagues – through his relentless opposition to “earmarks,” and Bernard Sanders, the Senate’s only socialist.
And while the bill is not perfect, it did, as Thomas Jackson commented on this blog, “crack the door.”
Calling it “the first significant reform to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act . . . in more than a decade,” the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association noted that the “legislation makes simple, common sense reforms in the way federal agencies process requests for documents under FOIA,” including:
• creating a tracking system and hotline for requesters;
• imposing real consequences on federal agencies for missing statutory deadlines;
• creating an ombudsman to help requesters use FOIA and mediate disputes;
• making it easier for the public to recover legal fees.
PNA also praised Congressman Todd Platts (R-York County) for playing a key role in what it called “this landmark legislation.”
If it can happen in Washington, it can happen in Harrisburg.