Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, reintroduced a bill Tuesday requiring Congress to explicitly state its intention when writing statutory Freedom of Information Act exemptions into new legislation. FOIA "is the power cord that connects the American people to their government," Leahy told a Washington College of Law "Sunshine Week" conference a day earlier. "The growing use of legislation to carve out new exemptions to FOIA poses a danger to the ideals of open government." See CongressDaily's coverage here. The Senate first passed similar legislation unanimously in 2006 but a bill they introduced last Congress did not clear Leahy's committee.
"Too often, legislative exemptions to FOIA are buried within a few lines of very complex and lengthy bills, and these new exemptions are never debated openly before becoming law," Leahy said in a statement. Cornyn added the measure "will ensure that Congress can't slip anti-transparency measures into legislation without someone noticing." The two partnered to author a 2007 bill -- which was signed by former President George W. Bush -- to make the first major reforms to FOIA in more than a decade. The bill restored deadlines for agency action under FOIA and created a FOIA ombudsman at the National Archives and Records Administration, which the fiscal year 2009 omnibus spending bill funded at $1 million.
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