Half a Year of Transparency Failures in Review

Thursday, September 23, 2010 9:00 AM

Today marks the six-month anniversary of the passage of Obamacare, a process that typified the Obama administration and Congressional leadership’s lax attitude for transparency. Indeed, the passage of the health care bill illustrated that elected officials would rather pay lip service to accountability than take any actual steps towards being open and accountable to the taxpayers they serve.

First, there was Nancy Pelosi’s promise to put bills online for 72 hours that did not happen. While this bill will cost well over a trillion in spending, expand the already onerous regulatory regime and increase taxes on businesses and taxpayers, the public had no idea what was in the bill. Despite the President’s promise that the health care debate would be open and televised, the various bills that worked their way through the process did so in the dead of the night, over holidays and via backroom deals.

This all could have been easily avoided if legislation were available online for a full five days before it could be scheduled for a vote. The idea of a “cooling off” period is one the Center for Fiscal Accountability is promoted for a while, and has been floated by House Republicans as one of the many ways to rectify the rampant spending of Congress. The idea to post bills online is a simple and sound way to improve transparency in the government by allowing the public time to read what is going into these massive bills and providing time to hold lawmakers accountable for the bills they write. Unbelievably, Speaker Pelosi even used this lack of transparency as a justification for passing the bill, claiming it should pass so taxpayers could “find out what is in it.” What’s more, the lightning-fast process, coupled with the thousands of pages of earmarks, sweetheart deals and arcane legislative parlance, left lawmakers at a loss as to what was in the bill, with a few simply refusing to read it for themselves.

Members of Congress weren’t the only transparency offenders – the President also reneged on his promise not to sign any non-emergency bill before publishing it online for five full days. After the House passed the bill on a late Sunday night vote the night of March 23, the President held a signing ceremony that following Tuesday, giving taxpayers little time to digest, much less ask questions, about the nearly 2,000 page behemoth. These transparency transgressions paint a peculiar picture for an administration that has touted the health care bill as its crowning success – instead of welcoming scrutiny and attention, Congress and the President went out of its way to hide the actual bill from public view. So while elected officials may have paid lip service to transparency throughout the year, their record on the subject shows an entirely different attitude altogether.

 

Photo credit: borman818

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