| Jay does a fair look at winners and losers in the forest bill process. I don't agree with all of his conclusions -- Tester should stand by the framework he's supported since day one.
That being said, Matthew Koehler is way off base here. The Energy Committee draft of the legislation isn't a Tester draft. In fact, it is so much not a Tester draft that Tester actually opposes the details of the draft. If the Energy Committee wants to release drafts, that is the Committee's prerogative, not necessarily Jon Tester's. In fact, Jon Tester would be a big jerk if he started publicly releasing other people's documents without their permission.
It would also be politically stupid of Jon to do so. The Energy Committee decides his proposal's fate. Going around them to publicly disseminate their documents is a quick way of assuring the end of his process.
All of this is my way of making another point. Through this while process, Jon Tester has established what is probably the most transparent legislative effort in the history of the Congress. It is to accomplish something that many Montanans support and some (very loud individiauls) don't. That's fine. But the complaints about transparency here, especially when echoed by respectable media outlets, could portend a very dangerous outcome.
Rather than applauding Tester for posting every draft his office has produced or his public responses to feedback received, Jon has come under fire for maintaining secrecy around, say, the committee drafts.
Notably, this hullabaloo over committee drafts is one reason why they are typically kept secret. The U.S. Senate is already a nearly impossible location to...do things. Exposing every considered option to a ton of scrutiny creates a lot of incentives to do even less.
Mark my words -- if the Tester Forest bill dies, not because Montanans oppose the substance or because the Energy Committee could not ultimately come together on the substance but because of bullshit process arguments, the lesson to Washington, DC, will not be to become more transparent but to become less transparent. The lesson will be to handle controversy by moving quickly and silently.
My feelings on this are colored significantly by Matthew Yglesias' recent insightful post on hypocrisy. Even if Jon Tester is being a little hypocritical here by being less transparent than ideal, the reality is that he is being far more transparent than the norm. Smart supporters of transparency would (and are) applauding Tester's behavior in order to raise the bar for Congressional behavior in the future.
Conversely, Tester's strongest process critics don't really care about process. As should be clear, they're very much outcome-focused. The process argument has emerged largely because most Montanans support the logging provisions that are the basis of their actual opposition. |
