[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Pages 3623-3624]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           SUNSHINE WEEK 2006

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, as we take stock during the second annual 
Sunshine Week, we confront the disturbing reality that the foundations 
of our open government are under direct assault from the first White 
House in modern times that is openly hostile to the public's right to 
know.
  The right to know is a cornerstone of our democracy. Without it, 
citizens are kept in the dark about key policy decisions that directly 
affect their lives. Without open government, citizens cannot make 
informed choices at the ballot box. Without access to public documents 
and a vibrant free press, officials can make decisions in the shadows, 
often in collusion with special interests, escaping accountability for 
their actions. And once eroded, these rights are hard to win back.
  The right to know is nourished by openness and vigorous congressional 
oversight of Federal agencies, but both are sorely lacking, and 
government effectiveness and accountability have been among the 
casualties. The disastrous failure to prepare for and respond to 
Hurricane Katrina is only the most recent example, but a glaring one. 
Despite misleading assertions in the storm's horrific aftermath, we now 
know that the White House was warned in advance that the levees could 
fail in a hurricane. We have belatedly seen videotapes in which 
President Bush was cautioned by FEMA officials of this great danger.
  The Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, empowers the American people to 
pry information from their Government that agencies would prefer to 
keep locked away. Americans learned more about Abu Ghraib and 
conditions at Guantanamo from FOIA requests than from oversight by 
Congress.
  As we celebrate FOIA's fourth decade as law, we also watch its 
erosion as a target of attacks such as when the administration pushed 
an overly broad FOIA waiver for the Department of Homeland Security's 
charter the single biggest rollback of FOIA in its 40-year history.
  It has been nearly a decade since Congress has approved major reforms 
to the Freedom of Information Act. Last year during Sunshine Week, 
Senator Cornyn and I introduced bipartisan legislation, S.394, to 
curtail the assault on FOIA. The Open Government Act contains more than 
a dozen substantive provisions, designed to strengthen FOIA and close 
loopholes, to help FOIA requestors obtain timely responses to their 
requests, to ensure that agencies have strong incentives to act on FOIA 
requests, and to provide FOIA officials with all of the tools they need 
to make sure that our government remains open and accessible.
  A second bill that I introduced with Senator Cornyn last year, the 
Faster FOIA Act, S.589, would specifically address the issue of agency 
delay in processing FOIA requests. We propose to establish a commission 
to review the persistent issue of delay and to make recommendations for 
reducing impediments to the efficient processing of requests. This bill 
was reported by the Judiciary Committee and awaits floor action.
  Our free press and the consciences of whistleblowers also serve the 
public's right to know. We would not know of the domestic spying 
program conducted in secret by the National Security Agency, with the 
full approval of the White House, unless the press had revealed it last 
December. The Department of Justice is stonewalling Congress's efforts 
to obtain facts on this program while threatening to prosecute 
reporters who disclosed the illegal program to the public.
  The Bush administration has kept vital facts secret by silencing 
scientists and experts. We saw it with the gagging of NASA scientist 
James Hansen, whose conclusions about the dangers of greenhouse gas 
emissions and global warming differed with administration policy. This 
administration also secretly let lobbyists from polluting industries 
write rules on mercury emissions, overriding the advice of the EPA's 
scientists and even drawing a harsh rebuke from EPA's inspector 
general. This tacit war on science--trumping scientific evidence with 
ideology--has also victimized women's access to the Plan B pill and cut 
international family planning funds which help the poorest of the poor, 
even though the evidence is clear that these funds reduce the numbers 
of abortions.
  This kind of secrecy produces bad policies, as we saw when the Bush 
administration tried to hide the true cost of its Medicare prescription 
drug plan from Congress and the American people. While they were 
twisting congressional arms for votes on the program, political leaders 
at Medicare told Congress the price tag was $400 billion. Medicare's 
own accountants projected the cost to be $500 billion to $600 billion, 
but one of those career staff, Richard Foster, was threatened with 
being fired if he told Congress the truth.
  We saw it again when the political leadership of the Justice 
Department overruled career lawyers who found that Congressman Tom 
DeLay's Texas redistricting plan illegally diluted Black and Hispanic 
voting power. Career attorneys also found that a Georgia voter-
identification law would discriminate against Black voters. The 
Department's political leaders dismissed these findings and quietly 
approved both plans. We only learned of these politically motivated 
decisions later when the press obtained documents and made them public.
  In a situation that borders on the absurd, the intelligence agencies 
have been quietly reclassifying documents that were open for years. 
This program began in 1999 but has exploded under this administration, 
which has reclassified more than 55,000 pages. Even the Archivist of 
the United States said he knew ``precious little'' of the program until 
it was revealed by the press.
  The examples go on and on. The Bush administration has displayed a 
near-total disdain for the free press and the public's right to know.

[[Page 3624]]

  Sunshine Week invites an inventory check on tools like the Freedom of 
Information Act that make real the public's right to know. Attacks on 
these tools only erode that right. A free, open, and accountable 
democracy is what our forefathers fought and died for, and it is the 
duty of each new generation to protect this vital heritage and 
inheritance.

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