Editorial: Stubborn refusal to open up records

Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2002 | 8:46 a.m.

It was encouraging to hear Senate Assistant Majority Leader Harry Reid say over the weekend that he would join a lawsuit filed by the General Accounting Office to force Vice President Dick Cheney to turn over records kept by a White House energy task force. The Nevada Democrat, who will file a "friend of the court" brief, wants to find out if the secret meetings Cheney held with energy executives influenced President Bush to abandon his 2000 campaign pledge that he would base his decision on Yucca Mountain on "sound science." Any information that could be gleaned from the secret meetings of the task force could be useful to Nevada's legal challenge of the president's decision two weeks ago to give the go-ahead to the construction of a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain.

The Bush administration suggests there is a separation of powers issue, and that Congress shouldn't meddle with the presidency. But the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, notes that Cheney was the head of a task force that advocated policy changes and, therefore, the task force's work can't be protected by executive privilege. Besides, the GAO correctly reasons, Congress previously has had access to White House operations, including records of presidential task forces.

The real reason Cheney and Bush refuse to turn over the names of executives and the topics they talked about is that they want to prevent the public from knowing just how much energy executives, who were big contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign, ultimately influenced their policy decisions. But Nevadans, and all Americans, should know which executives were pulling the strings at the White House.