The Wonk Room, which is part of the Center for American Progress- a liberal think tank fashioned after The Heritage Foundation- has a post defending the lack of transparency in the melding of the House and Senate bills. The full post follows:

C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb is challenging Democrats to keep their campaign promise and “open all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings, to electronic media.” “President Obama, Senate and House leaders, many of your rank-and-file members, and the nation’s editorial pages have all talked about the value of transparent discussions on reforming the nation’s health care system,” Lamb says in a letter to Congress. “Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between the Chambers, we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.”

At first glance, Lamb’s request sounds reasonable, even righteous. After all, C-SPAN is grounded in the belief that transparency produces superior legislation. And maybe a certain level of transparency does. But if one actually considers the tone and tenor of the televised health care debate of 2009, filming the conference negotiations seems counterproductive.

The C-SPAN letter itself betrays this reality. “Since the initial introduction of America’s Affordable Health Care Act of 2009, in the House and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the Senate, C-SPAN has televised literally hundreds of hours of committee hearings, mark ups and floor debate on these bills for the public to see,” it reminds us. On the whole, C-SPAN’s coverage informed and entertained the viewer. But did it improve the underlying bill?

Consider the Senate floor debate. Rather than filling the 24 days of televised discussions with constructive and informative amendments, Democrats and Republicans recycled charts and talking points like re-usable shopping bags. Lawmakers spent days debating the Medicare cuts they supported in years past, denouncing scientific research, and introducing sense of the Senate resolutions promising to provide and protect America’s most active constituency — seniors. Senators from both party played to the cameras. Grandstanding, launching unnecessary rhetorical attacks, but barely tweaking the bill on the Senate floor. The real substantive change, if you’ll recall, came in the form of Reid’s amendment (and when he merged the two Senate bills). At times, the rhetoric on the floor sounded like cable news chatter. The real discussions and compromises — Sens. Lieberman’s and Nelsons objections, for instance — were reserved for private discussions; incidentally, the two Senators didn’t appear on the Senate floor until the 60-vote deal was struck.

It’s no exaggeration to claim that health care reform is only possible because of the ritualistic ping-pong back and forth that occurs through private conversations. Lawmakers eschew substantive televised negotiations because the reality of politics doesn’t square with the promises of the campaign trail; negotiations give lawmakers a conciliatory hue that’s unwelcome in the current political climate of machismo.

The introduction of cameras into the daily White House press briefings, for instance, hasn’t produced a better understanding of administration policy or more informative media coverage. Rather, it created an additional opportunity for political theater and posturing. “It has turned into a theater of the absurd,” Mike McCurry, President Bill Clinton’s press secretary, told the New York Times. “Reporters can be perfectly civil and launch good, hard-hitting questions” in private…then in the briefing room two minutes later, “they turn into barbarians,” President George W. Bush’s first press secretary Ari Fleischer added. In the modern media environment, even small inconsequential events or statements are often transformed into meta narratives or political attacks that can alter the behavior of politicians in ways that serve to undermine the legislative process, the article claims, noting the atmosphere of mutual mistrust that characterizes the interactions between the public, lawmakers, and the press.

Turning the conference committee into another Senate floor debate won’t improve health reform legislation. The televised conference hearings will become a drawn out theatrical sideshow — the real discussions will still occur behind closed doors.

The public should have ample opportunity to review the final product before the vote, but when it comes to legislating, transparency is overrated. Changing Washington’s political culture requires far deeper systematic reforms than C-SPAN television. The hard politics isn’t pretty enough for TV.

Update Ezra Klein is “conflicted over C-SPAN’s request to televise all negotiations related to the merging of the House and Senate bills” but points out that “What C-SPAN is offering isn’t transparency. It’s the illusion of transparency.”

Update Matt Yglesias agrees that “letting TV cameras into conference committee negotiations is a terrible idea.

I was dumbfounded after reading this, I must admit. The post makes legitimate points that most of the work on bills is done behind the scenes, and that given the raucus and unintelligent way much of the debate has gone on both sides- see here and here for bipartisan examples- giving senators and representatives more bill-irrelevant time on television is more akin to cable news than real governing and legislating. However, as one commenter below the post put it,

C-SPAN isn’t asking to change Washington’s political climate. It’s merely asking that the Obama specifically, keep a campaign promise, and the Democrats in general, to live up to their self-appointed harbingers of transparency to Congress. We are talking about nearly 16% of the economy after all.

I guess transparency in favor of liberal policies is overrated, even as campaign promises. Or are they still stuck on the Obama Kool-Aid over at CAP?

Another Wonk Room commenter gets it right (except for his comment about Republicans) for a different reason: 

Its good that no one has commented on this yet, hopefully it means no one has read it. The idea that a front line “progressive” organization is apologizing for the decision to break campaign promises to hold debate in the public is disappointing. That you used the Republican meme about democracy being hard and messy to do it is just disgusting.

So what if Representatives grandstand or are unhelpful to the process, that is all a part of how democracy is supposed to work. We voters can and do take that into account when making voting decisions.

Or, to put it another way, democratic republics are nasty pieces of work because they are accountable to the citizens of that republic. Perhaps the author of this piece, one Igor Volsky, would prefer the lack of transparency in Iran, Russia and other less-free and less-democratic nations? He could, if he wanted to help matters, educate people on the process, the likely bill to come out of the discussions and other matters instead of whining that a news channel wants- brace yourselves- an open and transparent discussion of a bill. (Shocker.)

I read Think Progress- another CAP project- a couple of times a week, and have read The Wonk Room two or three times. They both generally have quality posts and analysis, but this one is just ridiculous. Unfortunately, it gets worse. Matthew Yglesias, who writes for Think Progress, goes so far as to say:

The fact of the matter is that if Barack Obama had never promised a more open legislative process, he would have won the election anyway. What’s more, going forward members of congress and the administration need to recognize that they’ll be judged on the basis of the results they deliver for people’s lives. If everything is terrible on Election Day then no matter how much the process is reformed, it’s still going to look corrupt and horrible to people. But if conditions are good and improving, then these process concerns will have a way of fading away.

There’s an interesting philosophical dispute about what should be done with unwise campaign promises. On the one hand, it’s more honorable to live by one’s commitments. But more fundamentally, it strikes me as the better part of valor to admit error, take the hit for flip-flopping, and forge ahead without doing anything silly.

A number of things are wrong with this post. I will make it brief, as I have gone well over the word usage I originally intended:

1. President Obama won by being the anti-Bush. One of the biggest hits on former President Bush behind Iraq, spending and the economy was his seeming inability to be transparent, at least in the eyes of many voters. To claim that President Obama would have won by promising to continue behind-closed-doors procedure would have turned a number of moderates and independents away from him.

2. On Election Day, people do tend to look at what is going on around them. However, one can lose without looking corrupt and horrible- see the losing presidential campaign of Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) in 2008, for example, or the overly-transparent presidential campaign of former representative Thomas Tancredo (R-CO). Secondly, Yglesias is correct that on Election Day people will ignore corruption and the like if things look good. Perhaps Yglesias should work on reforming the process so it can look and be good, instead of encouraging outright manipulation of the voter.

3. I ask Yglesias to cite me when and/or where Mr. Transparency (President Obama) or “Bipartisan” Pelosi have, or shown intentions of being willing to, ”admit error, take the hit for flip-flopping, and forge ahead without doing anything silly.” Seems to me they have skipped the first two parts of the process.

CAP has been growing in influence since its inception, and has been even more powerful since President Obama was elected. It’s unfortunate that its influence and intellectualism are wasted on the dangerous precipice that is supporting behind-closed-doors secrecy on this kind of non-emergency, non-vital-to-national-security legislation. Conservative or liberal, Green Party or Tea Party, CAP and its associated projects should support transparency- or not- on a consistent basis. Its influence alone should dictate that it hold all administrations to the same level of honesty and transparency. Perhaps an old Think Progress post written in 2005 of Bush’s lack of transparency will jog CAP’s memory, or a paper written December 10, 2009 by CAP’s own Ken Gude about national security secrecy in both the Obama and Bush administrations.

“(H/T to Real Clear Politics for The Wonk Room post.)