LETTING SUNSHINE IN

Change is coming after six long years of systematic growth of secrecy and restriction on the people’s right to know about the workings of its own government. This month, overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives passed a package of measures that would undo some of the damage.

One of the votes nullifies President Bush’s executive order, issued in November 2001, enabling former presidents and vice presidents, and even their heirs, to hide controversial official papers from historians and the public in their private libraries.

Another restored protections that had been chipped away of “whistleblowers” against retaliation and discrimination when they report official misdoings.

Probably most important is the strengthening of the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, which established the principle that the public should have broad access to government records. The Bush administration has weakened it significantly. Guidance from the Attorney General’s Office reversed the presumption in favor of disclosure and placed the burden on the person seeking information. It told agencies to withhold a broad and undefined category of “sensitive” information. It denied waivers of fees for searching and copying documents and permitted long delays in responses to requests.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., had been pressing for years for a return to the guarantees of open government. A report in 2004 by his minority staff of the Committee on Government Reform showed how the classification of government information was restricted in the Clinton administration but increased greatly in the Bush years by expanding the number of officials who could wield the secrecy stamp and restrict the declassification process.

Now it is up to the Senate to enact similar sunshine legislation.

Until recently, many American citizens, including members of Congress, seemed to accept encroaching secrecy in the shock of the 2001 terrorist attacks and the stress of the Iraq war. Now, lawmakers of both parties are increasingly willing to oppose the president and risk veto threats as they question the management of the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina and, more recently, watch the unfolding of the scandal over the political firing of federal prosecutors.

A new wind is blowing, and a new respect is blossoming for the famous quote by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”