It may seem obvious to most now that the public has a basic right to be informed about the actions of government and to inform government of issues and needed change. But this hasn’t always been the case.
I’m drawing on this excellent resource, but wanted to summarize the basics. We should appreciate that these laws have not always been around and that we should exercise our rights in order to preserve them.
In 1976, the federal government enacted, you guessed it, “The Sunshine Act”, sometimes called the Open Meetings Act, which is how it’s phrased in some states. California and some states enacted similar laws prior to this time, but the rest did so after this act was passed.
These later states were reacting to the illegal acts of Richard Nixon in the Watergate Scandal. Nixon later resigned over it, and if you’re too young to have lived through that, consider yourself lucky. Though, as bad as it was, it wasn’t as bad as what we’re living through today.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was passed in 1966, and together these two sets of laws, though often challenged for clarity of terms, represent two key avenues that the public has to understand and engage government as well as hold them accountable to the will of the people.
Building off of my prior post on why we speak out, because WE THE PEOPLE are ultimately responsible for how our government functions, we also have a right and obligation to scrutinize their actions both to participate in or monitor meetings and to access documents that are the results of their actions.
When elected officials feel no obligation to be transparent with their actions, human nature to be self-serving either individually or collectively takes over and bad things start to happen — things that are not in the best interest of the community.
Being a citizen in our always and increasingly complex society takes effort. It’s not on each of us to monitor the actions of government, but it is on all of us to do so, collectively and persistently.
And when government is working well, we can all become complacent. But when it’s not, it’s time to remember why we have Sunshine Laws, that these are our rights, and that we are obligated to use them or we will almost certainly lose them.
Keep speaking up!
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