In Ky, ‘we the people’ are frequently ignored by elected officials. In both parties. | Opinion
Sen. Mitch McConnell won’t tell his constituents what’s really going on with his health.
Gov. Andy Beshear stops his top deputies and experts in his administration from talking to reporters.
Attorney General Daniel Cameron routinely undermines our open records and meetings laws.
The General Assembly exempts their own information from transparency laws, and stops telling us what legislation they’re planning, often springing important proposals on their colleagues and the public with little time for consideration.
Different political parties, but a very similar and troubling vein. In Kentucky, ‘we the people’ are often a pesky afterthought to the government that serves us. Friday, Sept. 15 is Democracy Day, and at a time when we celebrate our precious and fragile form of governance in this country, it’s worth examining how a lack of transparency further weakens our state and our nation.
“The perceived need for these laws in the 1970s seems to have been lost — the idea that the formation of public policy is public business,” said Amye Bensenhaver, a former assistant attorney general who wrote many open records and open meetings appeal decisions and co-founded the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
More secrecy
Take, for example, a recent story by reporter John Cheves about a lack of nursing home inspections in Kentucky that led to deplorable and dangerous conditions in numerous facilities. The state’s open records act allowed him to get much of the damning information. But when asked for more explanation, “the health cabinet declined to make the officials available for interviews. The cabinet also declined to answer most written questions the newspaper submitted over the next two months about Kentucky’s nursing home inspection backlog and the reasons for it.”
The same thing has happened numerous times to Cheves and other reporters on other stories who asked to speak to administrative experts on the ground.
Let’s be clear. Beshear did a good job on open records and meetings challenges when he was attorney general. He understands the importance of these laws, and the myriad ways they unlock governmental secrecy and silence. That’s why it’s a mystery why he routinely muzzles the people who work for him.
Our legislators are not so respectful of the laws that give the public a clearer view of their government. In 2021, in the waning hours of the legislature, the Republican majority overrode Beshear’s veto of House Bill 312, which allows the Legislative Research Commission, a panel of House and Senate leaders, to decide whether to release documents related to General Assembly matters. No legal appeal is possible.
In his veto, Beshear wrote that that “it defeats the entire purpose of the Kentucky Open Records Act.”
That purpose is to give the public information — and accountability — over the people they elected to office, and who, however much they’d like to forget it, work for us.
Then there’s Daniel Cameron, who is running against Beshear this fall. In 2021, Courier Journal reporter Andy Wolfson found that Cameron had done irreparable harm to open meetings and open records laws in his decisions on appeals in such cases.
“The fact is, Cameron and the lawyers under him have done more in his first two years in office to dramatically curtail the public’s right to know than any attorney general in recent memory,” Wolfson wrote, analyzing that “Cameron’s staff affirmed government agencies rulings in full 54% of the time compared with 44% under Beshear.” Cameron’s office, Wolfson found, also “tended to give the benefit of the doubt to law enforcement and government officials with rulings in several areas, expanding their ability to keep information secret.”
Less transparency
Government secrecy has become all too normalized these days. It’s why McConnell can simply show a desultory doctor’s note that answers few if any questions about his alarming public freezes. It’s why we don’t see legislation until five minutes before a vote, like the famous “sewer bill” that attempted to radically change teacher pensions. It’s why we don’t know exactly who is funding important elections like Kentucky’s upcoming governor’s race.
It’s why journalism and public advocacy are so very important, Bensenhaver said. She was heartened by a recent public outcry in Arkansas when Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced a proposal to cut out a large swathe of required information from the state public records law. The proposal is being rewritten.
“People rose up in opposition to a lack of transparency,” Bensenhaver said. But she’s worried about continued erosion of Kentucky’s laws that will “hide the information that belongs to us,” she said. “We need to be informed of what they’re doing or we lose control of our own government.
“I think we are in a very dangerous time.”
This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.
This story was originally published September 13, 2023 at 10:59 AM.
