(New stormwater photos and videos available at myvaresource.com – video of the Town Council meeting 6/16/09)
When President Johnson signed the FOIA on July 4, 1966, it was done quietly, very quietly. I think this was in part due to the fears that many government and agency officials fears a sudden influx of a massive amount of requests that would clog normal work functions.
The news media, in particular, since they were some of the primary lobbyist for the FOIA, heard that faint whisper of the Act going into effect and responded. What citizens gained was a new age of information and investigative reporting.
Despite hours of searching the internet, I could not find where that fear of being ‘swamped’ with requests ever really occurred. Sure, there were some issues but not the avalanche that had been predicted.
For the next 8 years not much happened with FOIA. It is likely that focus on the Vietnam War kept many citizens from worrying about access to public documents.
As the Vietnam War (or Conflict, if you insist), slowly and painfully came to a close, another event came to the fore in the political and news cycles. Watergate (you youngsters, do a google search) created a renewed interest in FOIA. It was during this time that President Fords veto was overridden by Congress and an amendment to FOIA was passed in 1974.
Prior to this amendment, if someone or an agency elected to challenge a denial of access to public records, the only thing the agency/government needed to do was to provide the Judge with an affidavit and the appeal would be dismissed. It seems to me that is a lot like having the wolves herd the sheep. In a situation where an agency or the government could be negatively affected by the release of certain information, all that would be needed would be for an affidavit being provided stating the rationale for why it couldn’t be released.
George Washington University’s The National Security Archive website has a good article covering this amendment. It is noted there that while President Ford wanted to sign the amendment, he followed the advice of Donald Rumsfeld (who supported the original act in 1964) and Richard Cheney who expressed concerns of ‘leaks’, and Antonin Scalia’s (then attorney) concern of it being unconstitutional, and vetoed the amendment.
In a fairly rare event, Congress overrode that veto and the basic structure of FOIA as we know it today was formed. If it had not been for that series of events, we could well still exist within an environment that government could refuse to release information, provide an affidavit to the Court and any appeal to obtain those records would have been dismissed.
One quick aside that I would like to note is that despite all of the ups and downs, and changing of positions on FOIA, there has been one constant. Anyone who has benefited from FOIA (and I’ll bet that covers just about everyone, whether they know it or not) has the media, those people representing and working for the newspapers of our county are heros. It is true that no Act or Amendment would have been passed without the dedication and perseverence of those elected officials who took up the fight, but it was the newspapers that pushed the issue and made it important.
Please keep in mind that thus far, I have only discussed the National FOIA laws. Individual states have their own FOIA laws and those differ significantly. In many areas, including in our region, there are still those staff members of local newspapers who continue to fight for FOIA and the right of both citizens and the reporters to know what government is doing in their jobs to serve the public safety, health, and well-being.
