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Originally Posted by aceventura3
...I am going to assume it is you and not me.
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Yep.
It is me, and host and roachboy, and Carter, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and the American Historical Association, and every non-partisan open government organization, and 333 members of the current House of Representatives......
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
This is an excellent point, that was ignored. Whats so special about the president that congress should be exempt from the same standard?
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First, I would note that
Congress has always been much more transparent than the White House....the records of every speech, every debate and every act on the floor of the House and Senate and every Congressional Committee are included in the Congressional Record. The same cannot be said for every White House meeting or decision.
And in the short term (while in office), members of Congress are held to pretty much the same standard as a president (or cabinet secretary, etc) through the Freedom of Information Act, which has similar exemptions:
(1) properly classified in the interests of national defense or foreign policy,
(2) consisting of internal guides or directives discussing enforcement strategies, the release of which would risk evasion of the law,
(3) the disclosure of which is specifically prohibited by other laws,
(4) containing confidential or privileged commercial or financial information,
(5) protected by certain litigation privileges,
(6) the release of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,
(7) compiled for law enforcement purposes, the release of which could reasonably be expected to create the risk of certain harms,
(8) contained in or related to oversight of financial institutions by an agency charged with regulation or supervision of such institutions,
and ? (9) containing geophysical and geological information regarding oil wells.
The courts have nearly always ruled to narrowly construe these exemptions in favor of disclosure of relevant documents......until Bush's EO, which impacted FOIA (by putting a greater burden on the "requester") as well as PRA.
In the long term (after they leave office), documents of individual members of Congress, as opposed to documents of the body as a whole, are not the property of the National Archives.
Ustwo and ace....if someone were to propose a bill to make records of ALL members of Congress the property of the National Archives and thus subject to similar long term requirements...I would probably support it.
But damn,you're talking millions and millions of documents of thousands of members of Congress over time.....big $$$$ !!!!