Today begins national Sunshine Week, organized each year to highlight the twin causes of open government and freedom of information.
Here in California, it’s a good time to celebrate the memory of Sacramento Congressman John E. Moss, whose gift to the nation was the Freedom of Information Act.
According to accounts of his battle to pass the FOI Act, Moss possessed not just a passion for open government but a genuine belief in the good sense of citizens. We could use a healthy dose of that kind of public-mindedness in an age when neither government nor citizens seem to trust one another.
Too often these days, people in power – in state, federal or local government agencies – seem to do the minimum instead of the maximum to operate in the open. Some are passionate about open government, but others fight the letter of public records laws and display no enthusiasm for their spirit.
Back to John Moss, a Utah native raised in Sacramento who served 26 years in the U.S. House.
Moss, who arrived in Congress in 1953, was not a journalist or press advocate. Instead, he was an inquisitive freshman member of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee trying to get information out of a federal agency.
“I was a businessman. I was engaged in a real estate brokerage, but I have strong convictions that, as a representative of the people, I had a right to know what goes on in the government,” he told interviewer George Berdes in 1965. “And I have also a conviction that the people I represent need to know what goes on in government.”
Moss launched a 12-year battle that culminated in 1966 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the FOI Act.
The federal law’s importance is hard to overstate, even though it is pitted with exemptions and has been weakened by delays and too many cases of outright noncompliance.
The act’s provisions have been used by lawyers, journalists, historians, researchers and ordinary citizens to obtain countless government records, many of which would otherwise have been kept from view.
John Moss’ commitment to access came with a corollary belief: Informed citizens generally are capable of making good decisions.
Here’s what Moss told Berdes in the 1965 interview, published on the John E. Moss Foundation Web site with permission from Marquette University Press:
“We are drawing increasingly from professional fields in public administration where, too often, they are contemptuous of the public,” he said. “They haven’t the confidence that the public can use information to make sound judgments … I think a few more of them should go out to run for office and learn that the public does make pretty sound judgments, given the chance.”
Too often, fights over public records and open meetings are viewed as the media vs. the government. Yet access belongs to citizens who use it in everyday ways and occasionally to crusade against wrongdoing.
Readers here might remember the diligence of Arden-area resident LeRoy Munsch. He exercised his right to attend meetings and obtain documents from his local water district several years ago, eventually helping expose scandalous misuse of funds.
John Moss died in 1997, remembered for many accomplishments but most of all for a law that became a wedge against federal government secrecy. His legacy remains an inspiration to those who share his beliefs in democracy and in citizens.
Learn more about Sunshine Week, led by the American Society of News Editors, at www.sunshineweek.org.