Glenn Beck, the conservative-leaning talking head on CNN Headline Prime, made an interesting point while appearing as a guest on his own show last night about video taping nomination confirmations:
[W]e live in a world now where we will send people off to fight and die. We will send people off to kill in our name. And politicians will use the confirmation process to become contentious, to talk about the past, to make political points?
You know what? Take the TV cameras out of Capitol Hill. Don’t let these people on television while they are questioning when it comes to war, because all they do is posture. All they do is campaign. And it’s really — it’s abhorrent.
This brings out an inherent problem with some forms of transparency. The more spotlights we put on politicians, the more we run the risk that the politician will posture for the camera and not be a legislator. Maybe that’s what we have today with floor proceedings, which are generally prepared statements and don’t really represent the legislative debating going on, which is instead in committees and behind the scenes. And the committee hearings that are televised are filled with posturing. So…
If we make all public committee meetings recorded and streamed over the web, will we just be pushing the legislating further into the back rooms? By recording a meeting, does the recording itself necessarily destroy the very thing it sought to record?
The same type of argument can be made for many of the other recommendations we’re making, to varying degrees. By making CRS reports available, do we jeopardize (as some would claim we do) the nature of CRS reports as a nonpolitical resource? It’s certainly possible — members might try to use CRS as a tool not for research but for propaganda, knowing the public will eventually get the report. I don’t know — it’s probably still worth it to make the reports available.
But back to video, I find Beck’s point convincing. Video for the sake of “transparency” may be an impossibility.
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Rafael DeGennaro // Jun 10, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I appreciate Josh prodding us to think carefully about transparency for its own sake. Glenn Beck’s point is worth contemplating — briefly — in order to remember that transparency is a two-edged sword.
Transparency is for democracy. The benefits of transparency massively outweigh the disadvantages. Ultimately, Glenn Beck and his colleagues may wish to consider what they show on their TV channel before urging removal of the cameras from Capitol Hill.
With the new technologies, society has entered a new era. For all the challenges, the only way through is forward. Here are a few quick thoughts:
1) Floor speeches were posturing before TV was invented. Members of Congress would clip the Congressional Record and send their speech to their constituents. In ancient Rome, senators used different technologies, but they postured.
2) It’s OK that many of the real deliberations will never happen in public. They’ll happen in the bathroom or the bar or the car or wherever is the backroom. But it’s still valuable to see what happens in the committee markup or hearing. The committee process legitimizes the legislative product. The committee report becomes part of the legislative history. And, if there is no committee process at all, that says something, too.
3) Regarding CRS reports, the argument for making them members-only would be more convincing if Congress weren’t allowing them thousands to be sold by a private party. I used to by sympathetic to the status quo on this point until I needed a CRS report a few months ago and found it for sale online. Make them public.
Off the top of my head, possible guidelines for weighing these issues might be:
1) Create space and opportunity for spontaneity in the legislative process. (For example, allow last-minute amendments sometimes.)
2) Allow informal, private space for members to gather and interact out of the spotlight. Official proceedings should be public. Non-official proceedings should not be. Each of us has had the experience of going to a conference and the most useful interactions being between sessions. All members to have that.
3) Generally, every American should get the same information at the same time, just as every investor should be able to listen to the publicly-traded company’s quarterly conference call.
4) To the extent anyone ever proposes it, reject rigid direct digital democracy. The US is a republic. But that’s a different question from whether to make information public.
Anyway, it’s useful to think about this stuff.
Rafael DeGennaro
ReadtheBill.org
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