Lawmakers betray public with secrecy

Pennsylvania’s bloated House and Senate has 253 lawmakers making between $88,610 and $138,327 a year, plus perks and benefits, with thousands of staffers at their disposal.

Even with all the resources at its disposal at an annual price tag of roughly $360 million, the General Assembly has been declining in productivity when it comes to enacting meaningful legislation.

Considering all this, one would think legislative leaders would be forthcoming regarding how its money is being spent. The people footing the bill might like to know. But that is hardly the case.

While the Legislature is not subject to most of the transparency laws that relate to local government, it is supposed to make its financial records public. Yet when a pair of news organizations requested records relating to legislative spending, the House and Senate turned over documents that were redacted so heavily that it was impossible to get a clear understanding of the purpose behind the listed expenditures. The redactions primarily concealed with whom legislators were meeting, and why.

Officials said the House information was kept secret based on “legislative privilege,” an obscure clause in the state constitution that they said protects lawmakers’ ability to speak and debate without retribution. Information in the Senate documents was erased without any explanation at all, and without making it clear that material had been removed.

This is deeply wrong.

For one thing, it is not in lawmakers’ interests to keep this information secret. Just look at some of the material that was initially redacted but later made public. A great example relates to two breakfast meetings totaling $1,623 that outgoing House Speaker Mike Turzai held last year. The unredacted records revealed that the speaker had met with Eagle Scouts.

Keeping information on government spending secret only leads people to think the worst, especially in this era of conspiracy theories and general deep suspicion of political leaders. It also further erodes public trust in government, which Pennsylvania can hardly afford. And if lawmakers really do have something to hide, that’s an even bigger problem.

We have serious doubts that the framers of Pennsylvania’s constitution intended the legislative privilege clause to be an excuse for hiding relevant information from taxpayers. The point of it, according to goodgovernment advocates, was to allow lawmakers to speak freely in official proceedings.

Yet the clause was the cited reason for blocking much of the information requested by Spotlight PA and The Caucus, a pair of independent Pennsylvania news organizations that were seeking records covering all legislative expenses, except salaries and benefits, from 2017 through 2019. It was part of their collaborative effort to document the spending of the Legislature. What could be of greater interest to the public than that?

We were glad to see that the House responded to the embarrassing report by backing off its legislative privilege claim and promising to release records with spending details intact. Republican leaders will also propose a new House rule that would narrow the scope of redactions in the future.

The Senate should follow suit and do the right thing. Its deceptive practices in responding to the journalists’ requests were shameful and should never be repeated.

It’s a shame that it took public pressure from journalists to push legislators toward transparency.

David Cuillier, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona and president of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, offered an excellent analysis of the situation in Spotlight PA’s report: “They (lawmakers) need to buck up, have some backbone, and be accountable.”

We couldn’t agree more, and we congratulate our colleagues at Spotlight PA and The Caucus for pushing to get this information out to the public.