Now I Agree with Grover Norquist!

A commenter on my agreement with Dick Cheney speculated what might be next: Reagan, Mecham, Graf? Well, I gotta say, the fact is even stranger than the speculation. In what is becoming an on-going series, the latest right wing nut job that I happen to have some small and likely transient area of bi-partisan kumbayah is Grover "Drown It In The Bathtub" Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Grover seems to have gotten a bug up it about government transparency, and I have to say I’m all for that. He recently published a piece in the Financial Times that I wholeheartedly applaud and support:

"The nice venture capitalists in
Silicon Valley are always looking for “the next big thing”. While we
will have to wait for another six months to learn who will make it
through the Republican and Democrat “Survivor” reality show we call
primaries we can already see the next big thing in politics bubbling up
from the 50 states: transparency. Making state budgets, contracts and
individual expenditures available to the public on the internet."

More after the click…

"Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas, helped advance this
cause of transparency last autumn by putting his own governor’s office
expenses on the web in a searchable form. Susan Combs, the state’s
elected comptroller, followed suit when she took office in January.

Five
states passed laws this spring mandating various levels of
transparency, such as posting all contracts and grants and even all
state expenditures on the web: Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Hawaii and
Texas. Legislation was introduced or debated in a dozen others and is
set to pass next spring.

The state of Texas has further required
that any school district that cannot prove that it is spending at least
65 per cent of its education budget in the classroom must publish its
check register – every single expenditure – online for citizens to
inspect.

Republican Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s governor, put his state’s contracts on the internet on the very day he took office in January 2005.

Governor
Matt Blunt of Missouri, a Republican, has gone the furthest the
fastest. Through executive order, Mr Blunt has put up the Missouri
Accountability Portal (“Map Your Taxes”) website, which posts a wide range of government expenditures.

You can look up the actual expense records of your favourite politician and bureaucrat. A linked website
provides access to the actual contracts let by the state. There are
other plans, including the posting of state employee salaries.

Mr
Blunt explained: “One of my goals has been to transform state
government by using technology to improve efficiency and enhance
transparency. The old-way bureaucrats like the paper-based system,
which empowers them and is less accountable to taxpayers. Few
Missourians can take the time to root through mounds of paperwork in
some de­partment to find out where their taxes are going. Missourians
deserve open- ness in state spending. These dollars belong to the
people of our state.”

Popular response? The Map Your Taxes website has received more than 600,000 hits in its first few weeks.

Opponents
of transparency tried in other states to assume large costs to posting
financial data on the web. Some proffered estimates ran into the
millions.

Mr Blunt demolished this delaying tactic for other states when
he put the entire state finances online without a single additional
appropriation – just using existing staff and resources.

Transparency is advancing rapidly for several reasons.

First,
it is moving fastest at the state level and is not stymied by partisan
wrangling in Washington, where everything is about gaining a footing in
the 2008 presidential campaign.

Second, transparency has a
visible supporter in the media. Putting state government or school
board expenditures on the web might be called the
“lazy-journalist-wins-a-Pulitzer” legis­lation. Newsmen and women like
openness. No more waiting around for pre-digested bits of news coming
through press releases. Now everything the state or local government
does is visible 24/7.

Third, most of this information in most
states is already legally public information. It just sits in boxes in
the basement of city hall or state government buildings. Putting it on
the web does not require changing any laws or asking permission.

Fourth,
the effort is oddly trans-ideological. This writer, a taxpayer
advocate, and Ralph Nader, a somewhat left-of-centre consumer advocate,
jointly sent a letter to all governors of both parties urging them to
make their books transparent. Both teams assume the other guys are up
to no good. And they are probably both right.

And what about Washington? The Bush administration was urged to put its contracts and grants and books online years ago.

Mr
Daniels, then at the Office of Management and Budget, supported the
effort, but the White House could not be bothered. So Senator Tom
Coburn of Oklahoma, a conservative, and Senator Barack Obama of
Illinois, a certifiable liberal, joined together to require that at
least an outline of grants and contracts be made available online. The
legislation passed last September and will be fully implemented by
January 2008. Although it is a step in the right direction, this
legislation is very weak beer compared with what has been or is being
implemented at the state level.

Washington will fall last. The
Democrats now running Congress have been moving backwards by making
their 38,000 secret earmarks – pet projects of individual members of
Congress – less transparent, and the keeper of the executive branch’s
privileges against the public’s right to know is Dick Cheney,
vice-president. His penchant for secrecy makes Howard Hughes look like
Gypsy Rose Lee.

There is a history of reform coming to Washington
through the states: the property tax revolt in the 1970s, term limits
for politicians in the 1990s, and now transparency. The argument that
something “cannot be done” or “costs too much” collapses when a dozen
states have shown the way."