The government has far too many secrets. From James Bovard at lewrockwell.com:
Federal agencies classify trillions of pages of documents each year—enough secrets to fill 20 million filing cabinets. Washington politicians and federal agencies routinely blindfold American citizens on the most important and most reckless decisions the government takes. As President Joe Biden told Special Counsel Robert Hur in late 2022, “We over-classify everything…. And 99.9% of it has nothing to do with anything I couldn’t pick up and read out loud to the public.”
The change in presidential administrations is the ideal chance for sweeping disclosures of pseudo-secrets that will provide a booster shot for American democracy.
President-elect Donald Trump should follow the precedent set by President Barack Obama. In 2009, Obama speedily released many of the secret George W. Bush administration legal memos that asserted that a president could declare martial law in the US and ignore the Fourth Amendment and other constitutional safeguards. Those disclosures helped portray Obama as a champion of civil liberties, regardless of his novel prerogative that presidents were entitled to assassinate American citizens who were designated as terrorist suspects. Unfortunately, Trump in his first term failed to open the files to disclose Obama’s biggest unconstitutional power grabs.
Federal secrecy is perhaps the most important bulwark of the Censorship Industrial Complex. Americans deserve to know how many blindfolds were slapped on Americans in recent years. The Supreme Court took a dive on the censorship issue last year by claiming that the victims did not have legal standing. It would be relatively simple to “correct” that decision by disclosing a torrent of cases of “Censors Gone Wild.” How many more humorous memes did the White House or federal agencies demand be suppressed? How many more internal emails or texts reveal White House appointees hellbent on muzzling critics regardless of the First Amendment?
