ThinkProgress picked up this interesting little item in last Friday’s Oregonian. Apparently Peter DeFazio, the Oregon Democrat and a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, requested access to the administration’s continuity of government plan in the event of a terrorist attack. Access denied, the White House said.
The American Enterprise Institutes’s oft-quoted political scientist Norm Ornstein told the paper that this is an unprecedented move. “I find it inexplicable and probably reflective of the usual, knee-jerk overextension of executive power that we see from this White House,” he said.
The White House has yet to weigh in on the matter, but given the administration’s track record when it comes to wanton secrecy you can likely expect a creative and legally fraught explanation (or simply none at all) for why DeFazio’s request was denied. (After all, the Veep’s office briefly advanced the argument recently that it was not part of the executive branch and thus not subject to an information request from the National Archives.)
But why was DeFazio looking into the classified portions of the continuity of government plan anyway? It turns out that some conspiracy-minded Oregonians called his office concerned that there might be something fishy in the fine print. Under normal circumstances this would seem to be another tinfoil-hat-type theory. But now DeFazio’s not so sure. “Maybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right,” he said.
