Transparency: The Hallmark of Good Government

By J.D. Thorpe
PatrickHenryCenter.com

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then Senator Barack Obama promised to usher in a new era of transparency.  He repeated this pledge on January 21, 2009 after assuming the office stating, “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”  Regardless of where one lies on the ideological spectrum, this statement should be a welcoming declaration.

The Founding Fathers understood that transparency was the key to any democratic government.  During the first Congress, the members of the House of Representatives voted to open the galleries to citizens and the press.  They felt it was important to create an atmosphere of openness when dealing with issues that affected the people and the laws that would govern them.  The Senate would follow suit five years later and allow their deliberations to be viewed by the public as well.  In order for a democracy to function properly, it is imperative that the American people have access to the debates and views of their representatives in Congress.

The transparency that Obama described during the campaign and early on in his administration is the style of government that the founders thought essential to good government.  But has the President lived up to this lofty goal?  To state it bluntly, no, his record does not confirm a new era of transparency.  In fact, his short time in office has produced egregious overextensions of federal power with very little openness or oversight.

On May 11^th, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revised its numbers on the healthcare bill and found an additional $115 billion in discretionary spending associated with the bill over the first ten years.  Between $10 and $20 billion of this money would be allocated for administrative costs for enforcing the new regulations.  Additionally, Democrats have passed the ‘doc fix’ bill that is separate from the original bill which will reimburse Medicare payments to doctors through 2012 and will cost $21 billion.  It was not included in the larger bill in order to give the appearance that it was deficit neutral.  These two measures wipeout most of the expected surplus of $143 billion over ten years that the Democrats had been touting during the healthcare debate and that doesn’t include the problems with double counting, future extensions of Medicare reimbursements and the loss of revenue from employers who drop “Cadillac” insurance plans to avoid the 40 percent tax on those plans. 

Continuing with this trend, despite claiming on many occasions that he would televise the healthcare debate, Obama only allowed one hour of debate on the legislation on CSPAN.  This was a bill that was nearly 3,000 pages in length.  This begs the question, what do they have to hide? 

The lack of transparency is also evident by the gargantuan size of the bills that have been passed.  It took 1,079 pages to list all of the expenditures that were included in the $787 billion stimulus bill.  Likewise, Democrats were not able to condense their overhaul of the healthcare system into less than 2,733 pages.  During the debate on the bill, individuals concerned with its size encouraged law makers to read the bill to which Congressman John Conyers replied, “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”  But isn’t that the point?  Why would you vote for a bill that you haven’t read and by your own admission wouldn’t understand even if you had read it?  How can we have true transparency in government when our politicians are passing laws that no one reads and no one understands?  This however, was not the most outrageous statement made by a lawmaker during the debate.  That dubious honor belongs to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who stated, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.”   

The healthcare bill as well as many of Obama’s other Big Government legislation; present a fiscal nightmare for decades.  The main tactic by the Congress and the Administration is to obfuscate the issues by hiding spending and engaging in accounting gimmicks which detract from the true costs of their Big Government machinations.  This is not the open government that our founders intended.  We deserve better from our representatives and only a cognizant and ever vigilant citizenry can ensure that our politicians are held to the model of transparency that our founders so sagaciously sought and developed.