Groucho Marx once said that politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it all over, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies. Boy, howdy, did he understand.
We are taken back to spring of last year, that long-ago time, when your legislators, Gentle Reader, were telling you public business was none of your business. Let's see how they went looking for trouble, found it, diagnosed it incorrectly and applied the wrong remedies:
The bad idea that time was Senate Bill 373 by Bart Hester. The bill would have allowed any bureaucrat in government (and there are a lot of them) to copy any memo to the legal department and circumvent the FOI. Why, of course. Once you copy the guys in legal, the whole issue becomes an attorney/client privilege matter. And therefore pert near any communication in any government office can be shielded from the public, and that pesky Freedom of Information Act, with a privilege claim. Neat!
The bill would have practically made the freedom of information law in this state not much of one. Winthrop Rockefeller's legacy--or one of them--would have been left in shambles.
And it was a damn close-run thing, too. Before the watchdogs started barking, the bill had passed through the state House and Senate. Thankfully, it was amended in the process and the press was up in arms by the time the bill went back for final approval. It failed.
So what was the purpose of the bill?
It seems a couple of universities in this state were worried about opposing lawyers using public records laws to gain advantage by looking over their legal strategies. So those universities, or at least the suits in their legal departments, were willing to kill the FOIA to avoid such unpleasantness.
The thing is, when questioned, not one person in the University of Arkansas system, nor the Arkansas State University system, could come up with a single documented case in the two years prior in which opposing counsel had used the FOIA to get a leg up. Not one.
It was the threat of opposing counsel using the FOI laws. Apparently government lawyers were sore afraid of writing to each other because of that threat. (You know how lawyers hate writing memos.) So the Ledge went looking for trouble, found it, misdiagnosed it, and decided to do something about it the wrong way. Babies, bathwater, and all that.
But not all is lost. This week, the state's Freedom of Information Task Force decided to oppose any similar bills in the coming session. Which might be enough to convince lawmakers, and their handlers in certain university settings, from attempting another coup on the FOIA.
Let's hope that, should there be any funny business in the upcoming session, that the watchdogs start barking a little earlier. Consider this editorial a start.
Editorial on 10/18/2018