Will You Walk Into My Parlour?
The White House is inviting members of Congress to a bipartisan meeting on February 25th to discuss health care reform legislation. My favorite part:
In the last year, there has been an extraordinary effort to craft effective legislation. There have been hundreds of hours of committee hearings and mark-ups in both the House of Representatives and Senate, with nearly all of those sessions televised on C-SPAN.
Really? What about these sessions?
posted by VermontGuy @ 12:46 PM
5 Comments:
No serious legislation will ever be crafted when the spotlight is on. The media and the bloggers and the populace can put cameras in more and more places, but that will just cause the people with power to move elsewhere. It also makes government even less efficient, since they have to spend some time posing for the cameras as well as making the deals.
Are you saying that we shouldn't be asking for more transparency in government?
Sadly, I think that as long as our government is structured and run as it is today, asking for more transparency doesn't work. It's like asking your alcoholic spouse not to drink, knowing that they will now stop drinking in front of you and start drinking in the basement instead. The goal (transparency, non-drinking) is a good one, but the request will not achieve its objective.
The bottom line is that the average American hates "pork" in principle, and hates Congress in general, but consistently rewards his/her own Congressman for "serving the needs of this district" -- in other words, pork. To satisfy both of these inconsistent demands, Congressmen must give lofty speeches about the general good, but craft laws that consist of pork. To do both of these, the speeches must occur when the spotlights are on, and the laws must be written in the basement.
I question the value of absolute transparency, but not as cynically as Lawrence does. It seems like the structures needed to organize a society as complex as ours have so many moving pieces, a little leverage is needed to accomplish goals. These structures can be best evaluated as a whole looking on the total range of effects afterward. But when light is shown on every minute detail in advance, they never get to form.
What counts is knowing all official public acts. Laws and regulations, and their effects, need to be open to complete public scrutiny. How the lawmakers arrived at these rules isn't nearly as important.
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