Blog

BLOG

Entering the Twilight Zone of Transparency

By Anne Weismann

It was nothing short of surreal to be sitting at a witness table listening to Republican members bash the Obama presidency for not being transparent enough.  These same members staunchly defended the right of the Bush administration to operate in near total secrecy.  You would never know that listening today to Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), who preached the need for transparency in energy policy - the same Joe Barton who in 2004 fought vehemently against disclosing membership on the Bush energy task force headed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

The ostensible purpose of today’s hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations was to examine White House transparency as reflected in President Obama’s decision to make White House visitor logs public on an ongoing basis.  According to Republican members of the subcommittee, this step falls well short of full transparency because those records are incomplete, often lacking details about who was visited or what was discussed.  As I tried to explain in my testimony today (read my full testimony here), this misunderstands what these records are and why they are created in the first place.  Visitor logs are no substitute for calendars and appointment books of White House officials.  Instead, they are created by the Secret Service to do its job of clearing visitors for access to the White House, and include only that information the Secret Service needs from a security standpoint.

This wasn’t good enough for the likes of Rep. Barton, who demanded the White House reveal details of internal policy discussions and faulted the president for not being transparent enough with his health care law.  As Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) pointed out, however, there were near round-the-clock publicly broadcasted hearings documenting the making of that law that left everyone exhausted from so much transparency.

To be clear, the Obama administration has some serious work to do on the transparency front.  CREW has been quite vocal about where the administration has fallen short, particularly in the implementation of the president’s FOIA policies.  This is no “mission accomplished” moment, and the president can no longer claim it is too early to grade his accomplishments.  But today’s hearing wasn’t really about productive steps the president or Congress could take to bring about a more open and accountable government.  Instead we saw what passes for business as usual on Captital Hill – Republicans and Democrats sniping at each other for political gain.

You can watch my testimony here, or in the video below: