It's A Sunny, Sunny Day

Or not.  Mary Katharine Ham reports:

He's 1-for-11 on his promise to put bills online for five days before signing:

President Obama promised on the campaign trail that he would have the most transparent administration in history. As part of this commitment, he said that the public would have five days to look online and find out what was in the bills that came to his desk before he signed them. It was his first broken promise, and it's the promise that keeps on breaking. He has now signed 11 bills into law and gone, at best, 1 for 11 on his five-day posting promise. The Obama administration should deliver on the Web-enabled transparency he promised and post bills for five days before signing.

To the thrill of technology and transparency advocates, candidate Obama promised sunlight before signing: "As president," his campaign website said, "Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days."

But nine days after taking office, he signed a bill into law without posting it on Whitehouse.gov for five days. Since then, 10 more bills have become law over the president's signature, and only one has been posted online for five days — and that was for five days after it cleared Congress, not after formal presentment. Two bills have been held by the White House for five days before signing — but they weren't posted online!

This is (perhaps the only) one of Obama's campaign promises I was excited about seeing him follow through on. Given that "good government" reforms are a crowd-pleaser with the general public, and this is a fairly simple one, I thought he might actually do it. No such luck. Apparently, all but one of the bill signed into law thus far have been "emergency" legislation, including the one that sat around while Obama was on a weekend trip to Chicago:

The Recovery Act was not treated as emergency legislation by Congress or the president. Congress waited three days after its Friday passage to present it to the president, and he enjoyed a weekend visit to Chicago before signing the bill four days after it passed (one day after presentment).

The Recovery Act certainly could have benefited from more thorough examination. The provision that allowed AIG executives to collect millions of dollars in bonuses was one of those last-minute amendments that a regularized, mandatory public review process could have caught.

There's hope that the White House may follow through on the policy eventually, but it does us significantly less good if it comes after Congress has spent trillions and fundamentally changed the energy and health-care marketplaces. The way this is proceeding, it's almost as if Obama has something to hide...

Hope! and Change! never looked like so little hope and so little change before.

There's my two cents.