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Thursday, July 10, 2008

President Threatens Veto of Email Archiving Bill

President Bush has made only a handful of veto threats in his presidency (far too few in og-blog's humble opinion). But one issue is such a threat to the foundations of freedom that the President has threatened a veto: a bill to require better archiving of White House emails. This article from GovernmentExecutive.com describes the situation.

Think about all the dumb--really, really dumb--laws Congress has passed in the past seven years. Almost none of them were so horrific to warrant a veto threat from the President. But archiving emails? That's worth fighting over? Apparently.

This illustrates once again that open government is not a partisan issue, but rather an "ins"-versus-"outs" issue. Since Democrats largely run government in western Washington, and many of the open-government news stories we cover happen to come from western Washington, many of the postings on og-blog chronicle Democrats trying to prevent disclosure. But Republicans control the White House so--guess what?--they are trying to thwart disclosure in this instance. The "ins" versus the "outs."