• Worker safety: Deadly flavors
Worker safety: Deadly flavors
Forget the legal intricacies about executive privilege and separation of powers. Instead, think about what is fair.
Do the American people have a right to know who Vice President Dick Cheney’s task force talked to when it was rewriting the nation’s energy policy?
Of course we do.
This isn’t a partisan issue. It’s a good-government issue. It is just as wrong for Mr. Cheney to stonewall on this as it was for Hillary Rodham Clinton to stonewall in 1993 about who helped her craft health care policy.
Public policy is usually better when it’s made in public. Secrecy makes it too easy for special interests to manipulate decisions for their own gain. Secrecy also undermines public confidence. It smells fishy: Who’s hiding what and why?
But the U.S. Supreme Court seems to be having trouble navigating its way through the legal thicket to the goal of openness in government. During this week’s oral arguments on the case, the court was skeptical of claims by the Sierra Club, an environmental group, and Judicial Watch, a legal watchdog group, that Mr. Cheney should release the names of outsiders who became de facto members of his energy task force.
During the Clinton health task force controversy, a federal appeals court ruled that federal law required that names of de facto members of Mrs. Clinton’s task force be made public. The appeals court applied that same rule to Mr. Cheney. But at the Supreme Court this week, several justices seemed unconvinced that the law applies to outsiders.
Solicitor General Theordore Olson said the president and vice president had to be able to protect the confidentiality of their conversations with outsiders so they could get candid advice. Fine. No one is suggesting that the public is entitled to know the name of every person from whom the administration seeks any opinion.
But when the White House sets up a task force to study and shape far-reaching public policy and when outsiders become key advisers, the public has a right to know who they are.
The Bush administration is making a breathtakingly broad claim. Mr. Olson argued that the president should have “immunity” from all demands for information unless he himself is under criminal investigation. That would put the president above and beyond the reach of the law in all but the most extreme circumstances. Justice David H. Souter pointed out that this immunity wouldn’t even require the president to state why a particular document should be protected by executive privilege.
The court should not grant such unchecked authority to the president. Nor should it be seduced into thinking that the vice president’s need for frank advice is at stake. Energy executives are only too happy to give their advice to the White House. In reality, Mr. Cheney is trying to protect himself from the embarrassment of having depended heavily on the self-interested — but far from candid — advice of his buddies in the energy industry.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
