Panama City The News Herald

The great compromise

SUNSHINE SUNDAY: Keep government open.

“It is often said that ‘the sovereign and all other power is seated in the people,’” a pseudonymous “Nestor” wrote in a 1787 Philadelphia magazine essay lecturing Americans on self-government. “This idea is unhappily expressed. It should be, ‘all power is derived from the people.’ They possess it only on the days of their elections.

“After this, it is the property of their rulers, nor can they exercise or resume it, unless it is abused. It is important to circulate this idea, as it leads to order and good government.”

In the same essay, more of which appears elsewhere on this page today (and much of which sounds like Benjamin Franklin, a Philadelphian) the author expressed dismay that just a decade after declaring independence, “The custom of turning men out of power or office, as soon as they are qualified for it, has been found to be as absurd in practice as it is virtuous in speculation." The confidence-building bridge to order and good government was vigilance, not vengeance: “Let every man exert himself…. Every man in a republic is public property.”

To James Madison, public confidence hinged on the governed having access to the same information in forming their opinion as the governors use in forming theirs. “A popular government without popular information” was like taxation without representation, he said.

Madison unequivocally believed that making government work required “the right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

In Florida, the government born of this great compromise – people largely giving up their sovereignty between elections in exchange for open government and shared information – is known, appropriately, as government in the sunshine. At the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors’ request, newspapers statewide are reminding readers of that rich legacy today, “Sunshine Sunday.” We stress, too, the need to preserve open government and open records, which too frequently are targeted by legislators for undoing.

The day’s intent is not to celebrate newspapers’ role in guarding this public trust – far from it. Newspapers are an arbitrary and awkward public surrogate for the personal interest of an individual, for Franklin’s public man.

As government expands authority over ordinary lives through incessant criminalizing of private behavior, and partners with corporations and professional associations to restrict competition and accountability for the goods and services on which ordinary lives depend, the space a general-interest newspaper can afford to devote to it all cannot grow commensurately. The individual’s burden to mind his minder is greater than ever.

Technology and politics as they existed in Madison’s time allowed his ideal to embrace hardly more than requiring the executive to make regular reports and maintain open ledgers; requiring Congress to weigh public matters in public view, based on information made publicly accessible through printed committee reports and the Congressional Record; and, of course, a free press as the people’s surrogate. Campaign contributions did not exist, as such.

Technology emerging as commonplace over just the past generation is exponentially more empowering to individuals than Madison ever imagined. From the photocopier revolution of the 1960s to online government Web sites, citizens’ ability to look over public officials’ shoulders has grown steadily and expanded at every level of government. “Let every man exert himself.”