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Obama's Five-Day Promise - Status to Date
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From: Clay Shirky <c...@shirky.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:49:26 -0400
Message-ID: <323a91800904100849r1200a210je3337065ae7cb...@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [openhouseproject] Re: Obama's Five-Day Promise - Status to Date
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On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Patrice McDermott
<pmcderm...@openthegovernment.org> wrote:
> That is bizarre and not good. May be because they are still getting their
> technological act together [...]
Doubt it. I think the logic of the situation is instead manifesting itself.
The only reason you'd publish the text of a bill in advance of its
becoming law is if you wanted a *different outcome*, which is to say
if you wanted public pressure to alter the current process. This is
the essential rationale of transparency, and it doesn't fit in the
framework of the 5-day promise, because by the time a bill gets to the
WH, they already know what's in it, and they already have a bias about
signing it. 5 days of transparency in the Executive Branch isn't
actually very useful because of the 'up or down' nature of the
interaction between POTUS and the proposal. Public involvement at that
point is an invitation to all kinds of system gaming.
Meanwhile, the place the Founders decided to host most of the system
gaming is in Congress, where factions are to be contained, to contend
with the construction of legislation _before_ it goes to the WH.
That's where legislative transparency might make a difference. I think
the Obama promise was meant to model the appropriate attitude towards
transparency, but I'm willing to bet that they've made implementing
useful (read: legislative) transparency harder, because they've tried
to demonstrate its efficacy in a place and manner that won't produce
many good outcomes, and it will be hard to extrapolate from that to
the idea that transparency will be good elsewhere in the system.
-clay
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