Slashdot Mirror
Extreme Secrecy Eroding Support For Trans-Pacific Partnership
schwit1 writes with news that political support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is drying up because of the secrecy involved in developing it. Members of Congress can read the bill if they want, but they need to be located in a single room within the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center, and they can't have their staff with them. They can't have a copy, they can't take notes, and they can only view one section at a time. And they're monitored while they read it. Unsurprisingly, this is souring many members of Congress on the controversial trade agreement.
"Administration aides say they can’t make the details public because the negotiations are still going on with multiple countries at once; if for example, Vietnam knew what the American bottom line was with Japan, that might drive them to change their own terms. Trade might not seem like a national security issue, they say, but it is (and foreign governments regularly try to hack their way in to American trade deliberations)."
"Administration aides say they can’t make the details public because the negotiations are still going on with multiple countries at once; if for example, Vietnam knew what the American bottom line was with Japan, that might drive them to change their own terms. Trade might not seem like a national security issue, they say, but it is (and foreign governments regularly try to hack their way in to American trade deliberations)."
Laws that need to be made in secret are bad laws. Period. I am hard pressed to think of an exception.
Then you haven't thought about it very hard. There sometimes are very good reasons for negotiating positions to be secret prior to the final version of a law. The most important one is that what needs to happen isn't always popular. If politicians and negotiators have no room to offer deals because everything is public then it becomes impossible to reach any sort of compromise. That said, you can take the secrecy thing too far. Room to float ideas and propose compromises is one thing. Negotiating deals that are nothing but ghost writing for special interests and lobbies is something else entirely.
If negotiating positions are always public, politicians frequently have to harden their position to match their political rhetoric or party positions even if that results in a worse deal at the end of the day. Lots of our most important laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were negotiated significantly in secret because, let's face it - racism was hardly disguised back then and in many cases it could be hard for a politician to support something that he knew was right but that many of his constituents opposed. Sometimes what is best isn't popular and a limited amount ability to conduct back channel negotiations is actually far more important than most people realize. Read a biography of LBJ sometime if you want to see a real world example of some of what I'm talking about.