Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007--Continued

LEGISLATIVE TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 2007--Continued -- (Senate - January 09, 2007)

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I compliment the Senator from Oregon, Senator Wyden, for being a bulldog on this issue and working so closely with me. Besides complimenting him on his efforts, and finally being victorious on these efforts, it gives me an opportunity to say to the country at large, people who generally believe that everything done in Washington is done on a partisan basis, this is an example of where one Democrat and one Republican, working together, have been successful, and we have been working together. So everything in Washington is not partisan.

Also, I think it brings to a point that as far as the Senate is concerned, as opposed to the other body, the fact that this probably would not have gotten done if it had not been done in a bipartisan way. For things to be successful in the Senate, it takes some bipartisanship and the broader the bipartisanship the better. But also as a substitute for bipartisan opposition to what we are doing, our bulldogging this issue for a long period of time has proven to override the bipartisan opposition to it because when we put an issue such as this to public debate, common sense has to prevail.

Getting back to what Senator Wyden quoted me as saying over the last several years, that the public's business ought to be done in public, that people who are surreptitiously trying to do things and then try to explain that to the public, the public is not going to buy into it. But the public does buy into doing what the public thinks Congress is all about, and that is being a very public body because we are representatives of the people.

I say those things aside from the merits of the issue. I cannot express those merits for myself any better than Senator Wyden has done. I don't intend to try to attempt to do that, but I will give you my version of why this is a very important issue. In doing this, I fully support everything Senator Wyden has said, and I associate myself with those remarks.

As an extension of what he said, I will say for myself, every Senator does have a right and, if he or she is representing their constituents, ought to exercise this right to object to a unanimous consent request to bringing matters before the Senate that they might feel are detrimental to their constituency or detrimental to the good of the country. Of course, an extension of unanimous consent is putting a hold as a way of protecting that right.

Since Senators cannot be on the floor all the time, a hold is essentially a way of putting the leaders on notice that a Senator intends to object to a unanimous consent request to proceed to a matter. Of course, I have exercised, and the Senator from Oregon has said he has exercised, putting on holds for various reasons. For a long time, I have made my holds public by putting a very short statement in the Congressional Record of why I was holding something up, No. 1, because I think the public's business ought to be public, and, No. 2, because I am saying holds ought to be public, so it would be unethical for me to have a secret hold, and No. 3, people who disagree with my hold ought to have an opportunity to discuss with me why they think their position is right, and I ought to have a right to discuss with them why I think something ought to be changed in their bill or some reason I am holding it up, so one can talk and know they are getting together to solve the problem so the work of the Senate can be done.

Since I have done that, I have to say I fully support the right of Senators to place holds on items that they do not consent to consider. However, a Senator has no right to register an objection anonymously. That has not been that way for decades in the Senate because some Senators feel that the public good ought to require that sometimes things ought to be done in secret. I don't happen to agree with that thought. So I am taking the position that the public's business ought to be public.

If I could expand on that a little bit, I suppose there are some legitimate exceptions to it, but except for the privacy laws, except for national security and connected with that maybe our intelligence operation and maybe in the case of executive privilege--meaning people who are in the White House very close to the President--I think there is no reason for business not to be public. That is, 99 percent of the rest of the business that the Federal Government does, from my point of view, ought to be public.

In practice, a hold can prevent a measure from coming before the Senate indefinitely. This gives tremendous power to a single Senator that no single Senator should be able to exercise for a very long period of time, maybe in the purist way--but in the less pure way should not be able to exercise secretly because the public's business ought to be done in the public.

There is no good reason why a Senator should be able to singlehandedly block the Senate's business without public accountability. For several years now, as I have said, I have practiced using holds for various reasons, but I placed a statement in the RECORD of why I was doing it.

We must have transparency in the legislative process for the right of the public to know what we are doing but also to expedite the public's work. The use of secret holds damages public confidence in the institution of the Senate. I figure a secondary, subsidiary benefit of what we are doing is when people get the idea that we are not trying to do something secret, that the public's business is public, they are going to be less cynical about the institutions of Government generally. The less cynicism we have, the more confidence people are going to have in the institutions of Government and the better our Government is going to operate, the better the representative system of Government is going to operate.

But where does less cynicism start? It doesn't start necessarily with changing the rules. It starts with people such as Senator Grassley, Senator Wyden, and Senator Whitehouse because when we do things in the way the public expects us to do them and more Senators do that all the time, Senator by Senator we are going to reduce the cynicism and enhance public respect for the institutions of Government.

The purpose of the underlying bill before the Senate is to provide greater transparency in the legislative process. Therefore, the amendment by Senator Wyden and this Senator from Iowa is a natural extension of that purpose. It is quite appropriate that this underlying bill include disclosure requirements for holds that he and I have been working on for several years.

In the process, we have to compliment Senator Reid for including this in the underlying bill and Senator McConnell, and I am not sure how they individually felt about this in the past. But I think it is very clear that with the vote we had last year--I think it was in the mid-eighties--of Senators who support what we are doing, it is a foregone conclusion that regardless of how leaders might feel about it, if they were on the other side, they were very much in the minority.

Realism finally comes through when we have consistency and determination, as Senator Wyden has demonstrated and that vote demonstrates, and it is a tribute to our leaders that if they don't necessarily like what we are doing, that they have included it in their legislation. Obviously, I have to give thanks to them. I, also, give thanks to Senator Lott who, over a period of couple of years, has been working with us. I, also, wish to give credit to the President pro tempore, Senator Byrd, who a couple years back gave us some encouragement along this line.

I hope, now that everything is coming together, that within a few short weeks we can have a very open process of making holds public, bringing people together and producing results in the Senate because of one giant step we are taking here.

Doing away with holds might not sound like one giant step, but it is from the standpoint if you knew what the four-letter word ``hold' does to the legislative process around here, it grinds everything to a halt--everything to a halt. Try to explain to your constituents back home that some Senator has a hold on a bill and try to explain that is why we can't get something done. They wonder what planet we come from. It is very difficult to explain.

We are still going to have holds, we still have to explain it, but at least I can say to people it is Senator Smith or Senator Jones or Senator Wilson who has a hold on the bill, and I am going to talk with them and see what we can do about it and get something done.

I compliment the Senator from Oregon very much and hopefully the Senate is going to work better.

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