Sunshine Week occurs each year in mid-March, coinciding with James Madison’s birthday and National Freedom of Information Day on March 16th. This is the week when journalists and citizens across the country celebrate together the importance of open government and the dangers of excessive secrecy.
The national initiative was created in March 2005 by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Democrats in the Colorado State Capitol celebrated Sunshine Week by undermining its very essence.
Legislators on Monday passed a bill exempting themselves from Colorado’s open meetings law passed in 1972, a law that declares it is ”the policy of this state that the formation of public policy is public business and may not be conducted in secret.”
That earlier law, dubbed the Colorado Sunshine Law, is the polar opposite of the new law, let's call it the Colorado Darkness Law, passed and signed by Gov. Jared Polis this week.
“All of the policy making in the legislature would now be exempt from public observation in this bill,” First Amendment lawyer Steve Zansberg told our Denver editor Luige Del Puerto.
How will this affect reporters’ ability to cover big and small proposals coming out of the state Capitol?
“It’s pretty self-evident if reporters aren’t made aware of meetings, no notice is provided, and meetings are taking place electronically and outside the presence and knowledge of reporters then more importantly, the public will be completely in the dark about the formulation of public policy by one of the three branches of government,” Zansberg said.
I expected Gov. Polis to veto this bill just the way he vetoed legislation last year that would have barred the recovery of attorney's fees by a plaintiff in cases dealing with the open meetings law.
“(We) should strive for increased transparency and accountability, not less transparency and accountability, throughout our democratic institutions,” the governor wrote at the time.
So why didn’t he veto this bill?
My guess is that intellectual vanity has begun to set in among Democrats in Colorado, as it eventually does in all one-party states. “When we hold all the levers to power, we can pretty much do what we want, because we know better than everyone else and we are beholden to no one,” the thinking usually goes.
In my 18 years spent in Washington, D.C., it was intellectual vanity, usually worst among the smartest people in the city, that I came to conclude was Washington’s biggest problem. Politicians begin to think they can do no wrong after too much time in office, and stop listening to those who disagree with them. It’s what drove me out of Washington back to Colorado, frankly.
You've seen such intellectual vanity completely take over in other one-party states, like Russia, China, Cuba and Eritrea.
Cai Xia knows intimately about one-party systems. He has been a professor of political theory in China at the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing, the CCP’s top academy, and offers some good perspective for Colorado’s Democrats. In a 2021 essay in The Economist, he wrote:
“The reality is that Chinese society is fragile because of the country’s one-party dictatorship, and adopting democratic practices would strengthen it.…In the long run, the one-party system, by not allowing alternative views to be expressed openly, will be a disaster for China’s development and human society.”
Interestingly, the legislators who pushed this bill through did not meet with those who held “alternative views” before approving the bill, nor did Polis. The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, which Zansberg heads, had scheduled a meeting with the governor’s office to discuss the bill, but Polis ghosted them and went ahead and approved it a couple days after it passed. The League of Women Voters of Colorado had publicly urged him to veto the measure. Would it have been so difficult to hear what they had to say first?
In one-party states, alas, the intellectual vanity of the majority leads to a mindset in which those in power refuse to consider or even hear what the other side might have to contribute.
This one-party kind of thinking is actually spreading like a virus in our country.
After last November’s elections, there are more states under one-party control than ever before in history. One party runs everything in 39 states, both houses of the legislature and the governorship. Republicans control 22 states, while Democrats control 17, according to a recent Politico assessment. In Colorado, Democrats not only control both houses of the legislature and the governorships but all major statewide offices as well, such as attorney general and secretary of state.
The number of states with one-party rule has steadily been on the rise in recent years. Seventeen had divided governments in 2018. That dropped to 13 in 2020 and is now down to 11, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
This seems to me a dangerous trend for democracy for many reasons:
1. The absence of checks and balances leads to new laws in different states on extreme opposite sides of high-profile controversial issues such as gender, firearms and abortion.
2. When one party holds all the power, they try to consolidate that power via gerrymandering or restrictive election laws so that they can continue in power into the far future.
3. One-party politics eventually pushes all politics to the extremes, because there is no one pushing it toward the middle. Even the party out of power goes to extremes to counter what they see as extreme partisanship in the ruling party.
4. Candidates in places where a single party dominates usually become louder and more extreme to avoid being primaried by someone more “Republican” or more “Democratic” than they are, meaning more extreme.
5. A one party state means that party leaders can set a narrow agenda, and demand loyalty to that agenda by threatening to cut off party funds to candidates. That means dissent is tolerated less and less, and the party in charge becomes more and more dogmatic.
The Democrats in Colorado shutting out the public from seeing what it does when it is making laws is a sure first sign of more abuses of power to come.
“Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of,” Bill Moyers once said.
What scares me most is where, in their secret meetings and smoke-filled backrooms, Colorado's ruling party might take us next.
Happy Sunshine Week!
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