Legislature’s secrecy

Details of spending blacked out on report

It’s a recurring theme in Pennsylvania politics: Candidates for the Legislature proclaim the need for transparency in government while on the campaign trail, and then kick that concept aside once elected to office.

Lawmakers may say they are committed to transparency, but the evidence says otherwise — and it’s time they stopped trying to hide behind legal tactics that keep taxpayers in the dark.

The latest example comes out of a report from The Caucus and Spotlight PA — an independent, nonpartisan newsroom of which the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is a partner — that looked at the Legislature’s expenses (other than salaries and benefits) from 2017 to 2019.

Although the House and Senate turned over nearly 3,000 pages of financial records, many contained only vague descriptions of expenses, or had redactions that often concealed who legislators — or their aides — were meeting with, and why.

Among the more absurd expense items reported were four charges of $95.25 each for staffers who stayed overnight in Pittsburgh to meet “with [REDACTED] … and legislation to create a [REDACTED]”; a onetime top Senate staffer reported spending $265.49 for lodging and parking in Washington to “attend meetings on [REDACTED].”

The Legislature, the largest state legislative body in the nation and one of the most expensive, routinely exempts itself from public records laws, but financial records are among the few items required to be made public.

So what’s the explanation for redacting information about public expenses? Legislative officials used an obscure clause in the state constitution — the “legislative privilege” — that allows legislators to speak or debate without retribution in either chamber, and somehow morphed that into a blanket immunity against transparency.

Even worse, House officials claim the privilege extends to staffers or anyone working on their behalf.

A lawyer for House Republicans wrote in a brief supporting the redactions that lawmakers could be “less inclined to engage in the full range of legitimate legislative activities that carry a reimbursable cost, for fear that those activities might be questioned or scrutinized.”

Actually, the lawyer has it backward. That’s the very argument such redactions. Legislators should be expected to have their spending and activities questioned by constituents. It’s the very fabric of the checks-and-balances concept that has been part of the American system of government for more than two centuries.

In response to an appeal of the redactions by The Caucus and Spotlight, Senate officials turned over expense reports in which they didn’t black out explanations for the spending, they — unbelievably — simply edited them out, as if they never existed.

Terry Mutchler, the first director of the state’s Office of Open Records, called the move “absolutely flabbergasting.”

“It’s a new level of anti-transparency,” she said. “We are now in the anti-transparency Olympics.”

If lawmakers are afraid to explain how they or their staffers spend taxpayer money, they have no business being part of a Legislature that spends some $360 million a year on its operations.

The claim of “legislative privilege” to redact information from spending reports, or to simply remove the details, is just the latest in the Legislature’s decades-old game of telling taxpayers that how lawmakers spend public money is none of their business.

It’s time to put an end to that game. Every expense incurred by legislators or their staff members should be fully documented and open to public inspection.