Sununu and Hatfield realized you’d be furious if you knew what they were up to. But they were also betting you wouldn’t find out. And the way things are now set up, that’s a good bet. For the most part, “finding out” occurs now only when key insiders, government investigators and journalists all happen to have lots of knowledge, conscience and stamina. Not to mention incredible luck. For the good of America, it’s time to improve those odds. The truth shouldn’t be a long shot.
What’s called for in the Sununu and Hatfield cases is simply this: a regularly appearing list stating that for a given period, the government employee in question took a publicly financed trip to place X for purpose Y, and received such and such as gifts from so and so who has an interest in current or proposed legislation or regulations. But it’s not enough just to put this information in the public record - it’s also got to be made voter-friendly. How do you do that? Well, when Senator Hatfield wants to tell his constituents what a wonderful job he’s doing he sends out mass mailings and makes television ads. In effect, what we have now is a system where good news about government travels fast and bad news travels slow, if at all. The way to make the speed uniform is to put both kinds of news on the same vehicle.
So we need a law requiring all those mass mailings from members of Congress to include a complete description of their latest travel and gifts and requiring every political commercial to specify any financial contributions relevant to positions the ad takes. A commercial portraying Senator Oilslick’s strong stand against double-hulled tankers must also show he received $45,000 from Exxon. Congressional mailings and ads should also be required to contain gift and travel information about senior staff aides. Violations would be subject not to the vagaries of congressional ethics investigations but to federal perjury laws. And remember, the mass mailings are paid for by taxpayers and broadcast licenses are granted by the federal government. Helping to make disclosure work better is not too much to ask in return.
The mechanism sketched above can be readily extended to cover cabinet officers and White House staff members like Sununu. In exchange for the millions in federal matching funds presidential candidates receive during an election cycle, they should be legally required to come right out and tell us whenever they or their senior appointees put some of that money into lift tickets at Aspen or yacht time with Donna.
And who knows? If the full dirt on all this money and travel were mailed only to those Enquiring Minds who are registered voters, then maybe with one stroke we could raise officeholder accountability and voter registration.
It’s not just the conduct of elected and appointed officials that would be improved by the straight scoop; defense spending could be more responsible, too. The way things work now, the information the public gets about the progress of such controversial weapons as the B-2 stealth bomber is pretty much limited to whatever the Pentagon and the contractor (Northrop) feel like releasing. Oddly enough, it’s all positive. The suppression of information about the B-2 has gone way beyond the legitimate need to protect national security and proprietary technology. In order to shelter its funding, the Pentagon won’t even provide answers to such basic questions as “Can the B-2 fly in crosswinds or at night?” Wouldn’t the national defense and the national debt be better served if this sort of baseline information were widely distributed? Again, it’s not hard to figure out how to do that. In the spirit of the health warnings included in cigarette ads, simply require Northrop (under penalty of the perjury laws) to include in its advertising relevant details about the plane’s test performance. All those Northrop ads saying that the B-2 is America’s most thoroughly tested bomber should also mention that as of right now, the plane has completed less than 6 percent of its planned test-flight hours.
My proposals would easily and quickly pay for themselves. If they had been in effect a few years ago, for example, they probably would have prevented the Keating Five senators from getting financially entangled with unscrupulous S&L executives and prevented the B-2 from remaining undertested and overfunded all this time. Is there another measure that could have more cheaply prevented these two costly catastrophes? That could more cheaply prevent similar ones in the future?
Solving problems with laws can be good news for lawyers and bad news for the rest of us. But the laws I’ve proposed here are different: they in effect say to public officials, don’t worry so much about the fine points - but be prepared to explain your actual conduct to ordinary people. That’s what makes voter-friendly disclosure at once the most efficient and most democratic brand of reform.
