This is the same Kline that said "There is no fat in the state budget".

The difference between journalists and legislators is that legislators are 1) paid by taxpayer dollars, and 2) make decisions on how to extract and spend taxpayer dollars. Both factors require the utmost transparency on the part of legislators. If special interest groups are pressuring legislators to make decisions, the public has a right to know about it. If someone needs to send an "anonymous tip" to legislators, they can pick up the phone and make a call rather than send an email, or they can mail a letter anonymously.

C'mon bthornton, think things through. If special interest groups are pressuring legislators, they're most likely not doing it in writing. They have paid lobbyists to carry their messages personally! And in the case of whistle-blowers, the facts of such cases are often too complicated to convey in a telephone call, and anonymous communications are routinely destroyed by staff, for reasons that should be obvious.

I think Sen. Kline is on to something here, and I wish him well.

Kline says he asked journalists on the Sunshine Committee “why [a source's identity] should be confidential to them and not to us.” He says he didn't get an answer. “ There is no difference,” he says. “They admit it by their silence.”

The press did respond to his question yesterday. Here is the exchange between Sen. Kline and Rowland Thompson, Executive Director of Allied Daily Newspapers of Washington: http://washingtonpolicyblog.typepad.com/washington_policy_center_/2009/09/senator-challenges-press-on-public-records-exemption.html

I'll give a more usable link to Mercier's blog post:
http://bit.ly/tfctR
To R on Beacon Hill's points:
1)Whistleblowers are covered already by whistleblower laws.
2)It is flat untrue that special interests don't communicate with legislators in written form. In fact, lobbyists send emails to legislators while the legislators are on the floor, about to make votes.
Lobbyists also pay for public opinion polling that they use to shape the outcome of the state budget and other legislation.
But when those polling results are given to lawmakers, they become secret, and no one else in the world can see them -- because they are treated as a "constitutent communication."

R: remember that spat with the "not another dime" email sent to Democrat legislators during the last session? That was an email, and it should have been public record. Fortunately it was leaked. The public has a right to know about that stuff on both sides of the aisle.

Bottom line remains: legislators conduct public business and it should be 100% transparent. If a person needs to get something to a legislator anonymously, it can be done in a way that gets attention paid to it.

Oh, and for the author: The main point of jmercier's original post is this -- Chasan should not just take the good senator's word as gospel if he claims no one from the press answered him.
Go look at the tape -- Rowland Thompson gave a comprehensive and very well-reasoned answer that advanced the debate and discussion.
It's irresponsible to not check Kline's assertion before publishing this, and it would be even worse to not put an addendum that corrects his incorrect assertions.

... and here is the CORRECT short URL to the blog post that plays the tape in question.
http://bit.ly/s0f9a

I didn't suggest that lobbyists NEVER communicate in writing, only that the most meaningful (i.e. interesting to the public) communications are most often not in written form. And if this change in law goes through, there won't be any real increase in "transparency" because lobbyists will just stop putting the good stuff in writing!

Some "whistle-blowers" are covered by protective legislation and some are not. And by definition, they can only be covered by the law only when their name and issue are made public. Some folks doing the whistle-blower thing have useful information for legislators (and journalists...) and prefer to remain anonymous from beginning to end.

R: If what you say in your first paragraph is true, then there's no good reason NOT to repeal the exemption.

Sunlight in government is never a bad thing.

Interesting that the author gets a whole lot of information about Sen. Kline, the one member of the Sunshine Committee voting no, but doesn't even bother to bring up the CHAIR of the Committee, Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr. It was Carr, after all, who has been trying for two years to get this Legislator Exemption anihilated. It was, in 2007, the 4 legislative leaders of the House and Senate who asked Carr to hold off.

Carr was criticized by some in the legislature, and elsewhere, for not moving fast enough on the 300+ exemptions to the public disclosure law. However, unreported here, the Committee can only make recommendations; it is the legislature which must act on those recommendations, something they have failed to do since the creation of the committee. In fact, in the last legislative session, not only did the legislature ignore the recommendations of the Sunshine Committee to change 12 of the exemptions, the legislature actually passed 7 additional exemptions.

It would seem that the biggest problem to open government is the legislature itself.

Here's a comment from State Sen. Karen Keiser (D-33):

When one of my constituents contacts me about her employer, questioning a policy (sick leave for example) or pay practice (gender discrimination for example), should the name of that individual be revealed to the employer? What stops an employer from disciplining or even firing the employee for complaining to their legislator? (We are an “at will” state and employers have no limitation on employee discipline or separation unless there is an employment contract or union contract in force.)

What about when a constituent contacts me urging support for some legislation that the constituent’s employer opposes? Should the name of that individual be available to the employer? You can count on that happening every time changes to the minimum wage law becomes a bill proposal, changes to the unemployment insurance rules become a bill, changes to workers compensation standards, or paid family leave and on and on and on.

Legislators get inquiries and complaints from constituents all the time. I do not think individual constituents names should be revealed. Seems like a good way to shut down constituents' open access to their representatives. If that’s your goal, then admit it.

-- Sen. Karen Keiser

So why not just exempt the personal identifying details of constituents who contact a lawmaker?
That's not what the Legislature has now. They have a blanket secrecy provision that means anything they don't want to share, they keep secret.

Cameron--do you have data on the state budget to show that there is fat in it? Having worked on the state budget myself in the mid-1990s, I can tell you that there's not more fat than you'd find in any big organization, public or private sector. There are limits to how efficiently human bureaucracies can function. But--as someone who would have been delighted to find more cuttable "fat" when it was my job to do so--let me tell you that what you actually find there, when you know anything about the state budget and you dig into it, is not "fat" but a lot of policy choices, and then of course some political ones as well. One person's "fat" is another person's Medicare or school lunch or road resurfacing project--or, sometimes, the sinecure job or tax break designed to appease Boeing. By far the biggest areas of "fat" I saw in the state budget were payouts to big private-sector interests, mainly in the form of tax breaks. The state makes those concessions not because it loves to give away money but because the private sector is much more powerful than the state, thanks to three decades of anti-government activism from the American right.

Sorry, this is off-topic. About the sunshine law issue, both sides raise important points and it'd be good to see some comprehensive solution to shield individuals' identities while expanding public access to the workings of government.

I see the press here, looking for legislators, looking, looking. . . nope, not there.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

why did the petition signers of R-71 not get to hide? Because percieved threats are not real, or proven to be true, threats. Under the "What about when" provision anything could be hidden from the public.

Provisions that "help" protect the individual from harm should be carefully made as to not invite a channel of hidden communication between "powerful" people who could claim potential harm (employee moral would suffer if they knew I was lobbying a legislator to scew over my employees, they might get angry).