By Editorial Staff, The Daily Astorian (Astoria, OR), April 24, 2008

24 Apr 2008 // It is an eternal theme that public officials will eventually treat their government offices as personal property. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have pursued a pathology of secrecy and exclusivity rather than inclusion with a vengeance. That's why cartoonists are on target when they portray the Bush presidency as a royal court.

Now our president's administration is fighting a federal district court ruling that Secret Service logs of visitors to the White House and vice president's home are public documents. The White House brought the case, seeking to bar Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington from seeing the Secret Service logs of White House visitors.

President Bush's lawyers argued that the visitor logs are presidential in nature and not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Bush and Cheney are wary of an attempt to portray their visitors as predominantly religious conservatives. The Bush administration says releasing these names would erode the president's power.

The Associated Press is one of two dozen news organizations that filed court documents supporting release of the Secret Service logs. The case is now before the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia.

It is a desperate argument to say that revealing the names of White House visitors erodes a president's power. If a president or vice president is consulting a narrow slice of a constituency, that is useful information that ought to be available to all Americans. The extraordinary lengths that Vice President Cheney took to avoid disclosure of who advised Cheney's energy task force reveals fear that motivates this administration. It didn't want Americans to know that it consulted the oil and gas industry at the exclusion of virtually all other energy interests or thinkers.

The White House belongs to all Americans, not just George W. Bush. The same is true of the vice president's residence.

A simple fact has been obscured in the presidency of George W. Bush. The American people employ the president. The White House is not the property of the Bush dynasty.