Arizona legislature changes rules on retaining correspondence
mohavedailynews.com
mohavedailynews.com
> When Washington legislators tried to exempt themselves from the Public Records Act nearly five years ago, thousands of Washingtonians angrily emailed or phoned Gov. Jay Inslee’s office. Inslee vetoed the measure. We considered SB 6617 a dead letter. Forever.
> But now the Washington Legislature is asserting that legislators have a previously unknown personal privilege to withhold from public disclosure the documents they use in their work for the people.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_process_privilege
If you haven't seen, alderfolk in Chicago are in a weird place as well. Since aldermanic offices aren't gov offices, records within those offices are exempt. It's gotten down to just a few in the past few years, but there were a tonnn of alderfolk whose official city email account were private domains, aol, msn, etc. The PAC has been very weak-handed in pushing against aldermanic office issues.
Similar happened with the mayor's office trying to argue that a pro bono consultant's emails were exempt because they were sent from her private account. Sued and won on that, but that's all to say.. there's still work to do.
Rational solution: investigate, and proceed with normal criminal process if appropriate, to deter future such behavior.
Far-right "conservative" solution: ban long-term retention of communications data so that future far-right attempts to overthrow the government can't be prosecuted.
You really can't make this up.
The idea that you or anyone judges outcomes is also a tough one to argue. Results in politics are complex to the point of being opaque. If you figure out a way to judge politicians accurately, do tell.
As long as the votes are still public we know what the legislator ultimately did, which in my mind is much for valuable than listening to the bluster they said.
Results are rarely black or white and less transparency makes it easier to create fake narratives.
> I attribute a great deal of the current polarization to the fact that politicians cannot have private conversations.
This really does not make any sense. You seem to be arguing for less polarized discourse, but I cannot see how that is accomplished by hiding discourse. By hiding it, you create little pockets of extremism, not to mention opening up the doors for illegal and traitorous behavior.
Politicians can speak freely right now. What they want to do is further game the system, and I'm not sure how you can interpret these actions as otherwise.
> I'll judge them on the end result
You can already do that, and in Arizona, the end results don't look so good. Arizona, despite having a lot of potential and having beautiful natural landscape, seems to be consistently listed as one of the worst states to live in. Even the mere fact of Arizona being livable in the coming century is debatable due to climate change.
In a public forum people would likely view the compromise as one or both politicians "losing" and a mixture of ego and fear of not getting re-elected would prevent either party from giving ground and taking more measured approach.
So your argument basically boil down to: the end justifies the means. Do I understand correctly?
Seriously?
This is serious stuff and the "solution" in this case is to prevent people from getting the emails via FOIA?
Isn't the entire point of the FOIA to allow for more transparency in government?
The above process needs to apply even for the simple "are you free for lunch today".
Or instead I can just quit using email and drop back to phone calls (which few people ever record), or face to face conversations - which again are never recorded. Just because we can save emails forever doesn't mean we should.
I find this argument dubious in general (with very limited exceptions for safety/security which should be clearly marked). Can you provide specific examples?
A legislator's job is specifically to serve the public. Hiding their communications from the public undermines public trust.
An important part of representing a pluralistic society is compromise, if everyone can criticize every move a politician makes it then to populist and idealistic politicians getting elected rather than moderate politicians that can achieve things.
I think we can see an example of this happening today where demoguages are making headway over more rational actors.
The job of a legislator is famously sausage-making: something that's gross even if the final product is acceptable. If it was done the way an outsider demanded it be done, it wouldn't be done at all.
There's legitimate disagreement on whether legislators' communications are viable public records. But I'd think that disagreement would be a lot more meaningful if it were held among people who had at least some idea what the job entailed.
You know what would help me get such an idea? Access to emails, calendars and other records.
(Nothing about this seems to indicate that it's meant to protect correspondence between legislators and their friends or family. It seems aimed primarily at obscuring political correspondence.)
Apply the Nixon test: should the public have been given access to the tapes that conclusively established Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate break-in? Most people think yes, despite them being “just” conversations.
Those are important nuances to consider as well and different people will change their answer with those changes even though all 3 cases we have potential access to his conversations.
Do we? We've got a guy named Wiener that has been involved in multiple sex scandals and is still in office, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Unless there's a second one, he's been out of office since 2011. There are probably examples of what you describe, but he isn't one of them.
Try screeching "public" louder and harder. Put your back into it.
You can expect legislators to operate better when every word they speak and write is not recorded for the political opposition to quote against them.
Better to make sure that the people supposedly using the public power they were given be allowed to act without accountability.
When we negotiate treaties, private conversations between leaders are useful and productive. The same goes when negotiating laws. Voters already have the most important visibility into legislative output: the laws that get passed and how their representative voted.
For the most part these aren't truly "private", they become part of the public record but at a classification level that may or may not permit immediate or easy access.
This is very sharp contrast to what's being discussed in this article which is the deliberate exclusion of communications from the public record and their destruction.
Legislation is all about compromise (or at least it was, back when legislators worked). There's a lot of give and take, of people modifying positions they didn't hold all that tightly in order to gain on the positions that they really care about. That means that people say one thing on day 1, say something differently on day 5, and vote still a third way on day 10.
If you're going to "expose" all of that, you can make every one of them look like a hypocrite with zero principles. In many cases that may be true, but you can make it look far worse than it is. And if you do that, then nobody can work with any give and take, for fear that the press will destroy them.
As I said, I think that's the steelman. That doesn't necessarily mean that I believe it...
Here, the Arizona GOP is handing Arizona Democrats an easy moral victory.
When you no longer support something as essential as open records, you’ve sunk to despotism. Open records should generally be like a ratchet: once clicked, you can’t go back.
There is always some level of this - that's perfectly natural, in our minds a lot of things go into decisions. However, we've reached the point where corruption, embracing antivax, and pursuing underage partners - all amongst a plethora of other examples... those are no longer ills strong enough to lower X below the level of Y in the eyes of a very significant portion of the electorship.
Surely that can be a valid conclusion of a reasonable person though, right? Party X can just actually be better than Party Y and that can still be true when Party X does some bad things. In my view, this doesn't become problematic partisanship until a significant chunk of value someone is getting from their party comes from their own sense of identity as a supporter of that party, because that sense of identity has nothing to do with the policies or other actions of the party in question: it's by definition completely divorced from any serious political estimation of the virtues and ills of a party.
The issue is that we're taking it to extremes.
You're assuming morals play any role in the modern world of extreme partisan politics. If the last 6 years has proven anything, it's that partisan affiliation is more powerful than morals or good governance for at least 40% of the US population.
I think the GOP hardline is about 35% of the population - those are voters politicians could eat babies in front of without losing their votes. I think politics is pretty symmetrical (but not fully) so I think it's pretty safe to bump your estimate up to 60% of the US population... depending on how cynical you are I don't think 80% is out of the question.
People who don't just look at D or R on a ballot are in the minority of American voters.
54% of the population are combination of Independents or Single Issue Voters. That is what sets the outcome of national elections
Which is not to exempt Democrats from any due criticism, but this is in fact a problem from only one side of the aisle.
I wish the above cynicism wasn't well warranted in many cases.
Right, and just like with the Georgia voting laws, it doesn't matter that a bunch of other states already have similar laws and/or the new law is a return to the status quo - it only matters when it's the "other side" that does it.
Now, that's what motivates people to vote, apparently.
Instead, winning is seen as more important than doing the right thing, and, well, we get the exact consequence of those values.
I just want an open government, man. Why is that too much to ask?
Because corrupt people want to be corrupt.