There should be no secrecy in public service

Many voters were gleeful when candidate Donald Trump told voters, that if elected president he was going to drain the swamp. Imagine our dismay now, as he dives into it instead. Trump’s administration announced that they would no longer publish the White House visitor logs. They are acting as though they own the White House rather than living there at the will of the people. Nothing short of the highest intelligence information should be kept from the American people in their house. There should be no expectation of privacy when one visits the White House.

My outrage was compounded in learning in the April 19th Olympian, that the Washington state legislators in 1995, exempted themselves from publicly disclosing their records. They quietly passed an amendment excluding themselves from Initiative 276, that was passed overwhelmingly by the voters in 1972. This is the equivalent of children telling their parents the house rules. The article concludes with then House counsel Allen Hayward’s observation, that ‘Nobody knows what would happen’ were this amendment to be challenged in court.

Legislators cannot usurp the authority of the voters and likewise, have no expectation of privacy as elected officials. Most assuredly this should be challenged in the courts, so that public servants understand that they must make all their official activities available to the public and so that the public can have faith that those same officials are working in the people’s interest and not self interest.

This story was originally published May 3, 2017 at 6:02 PM with the headline "There should be no secrecy in public service."