Conor Friedersdorf notes that stay-at-home mom (and video blogger) Kira Davis asked tougher questions of President Obama on a recent Google+ “hangout” than Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes ever asked. You can watch the exchange in this video starting at the 35:10 mark.
In response to Davis’s question about transparency, President Obama said:
This is the most transparent administration in history, and I can document how that is the case. Everything from—every visitor that comes into the White House is now part of the public record. That’s something that we changed. Just about every law that we pass, every rule that we implement, we put online for everybody there to see.
With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true.
Now, the White House has put visitor logs online. I was initially unimpressed with the achievement, but I do believe it took a good deal of effort, and there’s no discounting that. Perhaps it symbolizes how low the baseline for transparency has been. And alas the practice may have simply moved meetings out of the White House.
But it is not accurate to say, “Just about every law that we pass … we put online for everybody to see there.”
As a campaigner, President Obama promised to put every bill Congress sent him online for five days before signing it. As I recently reported again in a post called “Sunlight Before Signing in Obama’s First Term,” that was the president’s first broken promise, and in the first year of his administration he broke it again with almost every new law, giving just six of the first 124 bills he signed the exposure he promised. Over his first term, by my count, he gave less than 2/3rds of the bills he signed the promised sunlight.
And many important and controversial bills don’t get sunlight. (The post office renamings always do.) Recent bills denied promised sunlight include the controversial FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization and the “fiscal cliff” bill. Obamacare did not get sunlight—the president signed it the day after Congress presented it to him.
The first three laws President Obama has signed in the 113th Congress have not gotten the promised sunlight.
The Obama administration has taken some small pro-transparency steps, but far from what’s possible, and the House of Representatives is making the greater headway on transparency. President Obama has not put “just about” every bill sent him online. So, in the words of a stellar think tank here in D.C., “With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true.”
