[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 263-264]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT

  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I understand that later today the House 
of Representatives will vote to pass a reform of the Freedom of 
Information Act, which is often referred to by its acronym, FOIA. I 
wish to say a few words about that legislation.
  I applaud the effort of the House. I have long believed that it is 
really important to make sure that the people who actually pay the 
bills and whom we serve know what government is doing on their behalf. 
Thus the name of the legislation signed by President Johnson many years 
ago is the Freedom of Information Act. Too often here in Washington, 
DC, the people in charge of the information seem to view it as 
proprietary, as if it were theirs. In a political culture where 
information is power, they don't want to share that information with 
the people who actually own it and are the ones who hold the elected 
officials accountable. An open government is really one of the first 
prerequisites to a free society, and that is because an open and 
accessible government is absolutely necessary for Americans to hold 
their elected officials accountable.
  Our Founding Fathers, of course, recognized that a truly democratic 
system depends on an informed citizenry, but Americans cannot do that 
without the information and transparency that these laws provide.
  Former Justice William Brandeis famously said that ``sunlight is the 
best disinfectant.'' I must say, as a person who is conservative, that 
I believe that rather than passing a bunch of new laws, one of the 
things we can do to change the behavior here in Washington is to shine 
a light on the actions of elected officials and the government. When 
elected officials know that the public is informed and watching, it 
changes the way people behave, and it usually changes it for the 
better. Congress has passed numerous pieces of legislation that promote 
this accountability and transparency of government since President 
Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act into law so that good 
leadership and good governance can flourish.
  During my time in the Senate and previously when I was the attorney 
general of Texas, I made government transparency a priority. I pressed 
for more openness in the Federal Government through commonsense 
legislation. During the process, I found a partner in those efforts in 
the Senate. He is somebody who is my ideological opposite, and that is 
Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont.
  Senator Leahy and I both embrace the fact that most of the time 
elected officials and government officials want to trumpet their 
successes and they want to hide their failures. But the American people 
deserve to know the good, the bad, and the ugly, and to apply the 
correctives that are within their power, either in changing those 
officials or holding those officials accountable.

[[Page 264]]

  So the legislation that is going to pass the House later today is 
similar to what we have already passed here in the Senate Judiciary 
Committee by voice vote in February. It requires Federal agencies to 
operate under a presumption of openness when considering the release of 
government information under the Freedom of Information Act. Texas law, 
for example, presumes that public information held by government is 
presumptively open. If there is some reason why it should not be 
disclosed--let's say classified materials or whatever--then it is 
incumbent upon the agency to raise those concerns and then to have 
those concerns decided in the process of administering those laws. But 
the idea is also to reduce the overuse of exemptions to withhold 
information from the public. I hope this Chamber will soon join our 
colleagues in the House to consider this important legislation.
  There may be some things we need to do to fine-tune it. I certainly 
understand that on national security, for example, or things involving 
proprietary information--trademark protections and property 
protections--there may be some areas where we have to make some slight 
changes. But, essentially, this presumption of openness is important to 
the functioning of our democratic form of government, and I look 
forward to our passing the law that will be passed by the House Chamber 
later today.

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