Public documents belong to everyone, not just the PDC

By Bob Williams
President, Evergreen Freedom Foundation

Thurston County Superior Court’s July 24 decision forcing the Public Disclosure Commission to hand over public documents relating to campaign-finance violations by the Washington Education Association marks a win for all citizens of the state of Washington.

At issue here is whether the Washington state Attorney General’s "silent clients" — the citizens who pay the Attorney General to represent their interests — can know whether the citizen’s law firm represents their interests. While we recognize Attorney General negotiations usually need to be conducted out of the public eye, we concur with the court’s decision that once a settlement is completed, the information shared between both parties in the state’s case can be made public.

Even Attorney General Christine Gregoire acknowledges the need for the public to know what the state does on behalf of its citizens. Her office’s state-owned webpage (complete with picture of Gregoire) touts the public records law as benefiting government as an informed population is the first step toward achieving an accountable democracy.

It would seem that conversely, a bad government would be founded on the notion that the public really doesn’t need to know how their leaders conduct state business. Think about foreign nations where citizens enjoy so few freedoms compared to our great nation, especially the right to know the day-to-day goings on of their leadership and courts.

Thankfully, the ultra-secret decision making found in other countries is far from common in the United States. When we do get a governmental decision arrived at in secret, such as what happened in the state’s settlement with the WEA, we have a right to know what facts and negotiations led to those penalties and election guidelines. After all, having a teachers union pay a $100,000 fine is enough merit attention. What exactly did the leadership of the WEA admit to in private to achieve such a fine? Such facts are essential to the public’s knowledge if we are to have confidence that our lawyers — the Attorney General’s Office — acted properly on our behalf.

We must not forget why this whole issue ended up before the attorney general in the first place: During the 1995-96 election cycle, the state’s teachers union, in the words of the attorney general herself, was caught engaging in a "carefully managed, covert attempt to circumvent" the state’s paycheck protection law. As part of the settlement agreement, the attorney general issued paycheck protection "guidelines," which essentially undermine the intentions of the citizen-enacted paycheck protection law in Washington state.

What all of this means — the voter-initiated law, the settlement and the paycheck protection "guidelines" — is that this fall, voters won’t really know whether that lawn sign or television commercial touting this issue or that candidate was paid for by people who really believe in that candidate or cause. It’s a difficult concept to grasp, yet the effects of the attorney general’s guidelines will likely create a campaign environment where the perception of support or opposition for an issue or candidate has nothing to do with reality. Even worse, people who didn’t ask to get involved with politics will see their money taken and diverted to expensive campaigning.

But learning to what degree the WEA participated in violating the state’s campaign-finance laws will give us some insight into how citizens can be dragged into the political arena without their knowledge. And that insight will likely serve as a wake-up call to voters who would rather choose which issues and candidates to support, or whether to get involved with politics at all.

And that freedom — the freedom to choose political involvement — is an essential ingredient in any true democracy.

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org