WASHINGTON – It’s naïve to say that every discussion or negotiation of government should happen in public. Folks in my business say it should – and we are right to an extent.
There will always be conversations in elevators, quick phone calls, e-mail exchanges that help the adversaries on an issue come to common ground. It’s not only inevitable; this kind of interaction is essential.
But the Senate goes too far in permitting secrecy where there should be transparency. It’s called the “secret hold,” and it allows a senator to block action without anyone knowing who or why.
Any senator can put a hold on any bill or nomination, which means that no action can be taken unless the majority leader goes through a laborious process that requires 60 votes.
Let’s be clear: Secret holds are bad, always. Regular holds – where the senators publicly say what they are doing – have their purposes.
For instance, Republican Sen. Bob Bennett put a hold on a nomination for a high-ranking Interior Department official last year. Bennett held up action on the nominee not because he had any objection whatsoever to the guy but because he had a beef with an Interior Department policy on oil and gas drilling in the West.
Bennett thought the Interior Department was blowing him off – thus blowing off his Utah constituents. So he did something to get its attention: He slapped a hold on the nominee. Bennett got a phone call from the secretary of the department and eventually a promise of some action.
Bennett is convinced he would never have gotten as far as he did without the hard-ball tactic of a hold.
He is almost certainly right. Bennett also handled it the right way: When he issued the hold, he said he was doing it.
From the outside looking in, this appears to be one person taking the Senate hostage over a small, parochial issue that affects a minuscule fraction of Americans. When we are impatient to get a vote on a nominee or a bill, holds are teeth-grindingly frustrating.
But the Senate is designed, in part, to be slow. There are many rules and procedures whose point is to allow one senator to bollix up the works. This can be done to get results on a home-state issue – Bennett’s strategy. And it can be done to force the majority to deal with the minority’s policy concerns on legislation.
That’s not a bad thing.
What is terrible, however, is when senators don’t own up to their holds.
“If a senator has a legitimate reason to object to proceeding to a bill or nominee,” Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said last week, “then he or she ought to have the guts to do so publicly.”
Grassley is one of several senators who have been working for years to try to get the secret hold eliminated. But it always pops back up.
Now 68 senators – including Sens. Evan Bayh and Richard Lugar – have promised they will publicly identify themselves if they request a hold on any Senate action.
That’s good, but the process should be institutionalized.
It’s not the war in Afghanistan or the BP oil spill. Nevertheless, stuff like secret holds is one of those obscure practices that seems niggling but actually gnaws away at the foundation of democracy, which is trust in elected officials.
