This is the correct move -- having their communications publicly accessible undermines legislator's ability to do their job.
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...