Editorial: White House isn't hidden from view

23 Apr 2008 // Remember those news reports during Bill Clinton's presidency about overnight visits to the White House from big donors to the Clinton campaign or the Democratic Party? It came to be known as "renting out the Lincoln Bedroom."

There haven't been any similar reports about the same kind of shenanigans during the presidency of George W. Bush. Perhaps the Bush White House hasn't been up to such stuff. But the citizens would have no way to know that.

The Bush administration, under the guise of ensuring that the president can receive confidential advice, has effectively thrown a cloak over the White House by keeping under wraps the Secret Service logs of White House visitors. It was those logs, previously available for scrutiny, that were used to find out many of the doings at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. when Clinton was living and working there.

With a suit to make those logs available now before a federal appeals court, judges on Monday asked both sides to try to work out a compromise. The president of the United States should have the right to confidential counsel, the judges said. But the citizens of the United States should have the right to know something about who is visiting the executive mansion and how many times those people are coming and going, the judges also said.

The two sides in the case were largely intractable, with Justice Department lawyers saying that the logs are presidential documents and are therefore accorded full protection. The group that is seeking the release of the logs, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, didn't budge, either.

Any effort to find a compromise must keep one notion paramount: The citizens in this nation have the fundamental right to know what's going on inside their government. The chief executive and all of his minions work for the people. The White House sits on a very public street in our federal city for a reason: This is a democracy, a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

It's our White House, not the president's.