C-Span Drops the Gauntlet on Democrats and a Flashback to Harry Reid Whining About Transparency

In a surprising move, C-Span has sent a letter to House and Senate leaders requesting that they televise the health care negotiations.

“As your respective chambers work to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate health care bills, C-SPAN requests that you open all your negotiations, including any conference committee meetings, to electronic media coverage.”

It isn’t just C-Span that’s noticed the lack of transparency in this process. Mary Katherine Hamm pointed out that the WH press pool is also grumbing.

Rick Klein of ABC’s The Note, this morning: “We can all have a laugh at how ridic it was to expect hcare talks to be on C-SPAN, but it was a promise that’s been shattered.”When a liberal replied, on Twitter, that she’d seen hours of discussion of health-care on the floor, he answered: “that’s great but the pledge went far beyond cmte & floor debate to talks where things actually got hashed out. that wasn’t on TV.”

[...]

This weekend, ABC’s Jake Tapper gave Robert Gibbs a chance to make good on Obama’s campaign promise, but Gibbs declined with his characteristic soft touch:

 

“Well, Jake, first of all, let’s take a step back and understand that this is a process legislatively that has played out over the course of nine months. There have been a countless number of public hearings. The Senate did a lot of their voting at 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning on C-SPAN. A lot of this debate — I think what the president promised and pledged was so that you could see who was fighting for their constituents and who was fighting for drug and insurance companies…”

“Well, but the bill gets put together on the floor of the Senate,” Gibbs said. “That’s where the bill got augmented. And I think if you watched that debate — I don’t know — I wasn’t up at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning for a lot of those votes, but I think if the American public had watched — has watched the committee process play out in both the House and the Senate, watched the process play out on both the floor and the — the floor of the House and the floor of the Senate, you’d have seen quite a bit of public hearing and public airing, and I think quite frankly, people have a pretty good sense of who is battling on behalf of thousands of lobbyists that are trying to protect drugs profits and insurance profits, and who’s fighting on behalf of middle-class Americans hoping once and for all to have access to affordable insurance and removing insurance company restrictions like discriminating against people that are sick.”

 

Note to Gibbs: When you’re stressing the openness of the Senate process, it’s best not to mention that votes took place at 1 and 2 a.m. on weekends, when you weren’t even awake.

Naked Emporer News, via Michelle Malkin, brings us this little flashback of Harry Reid whining in 2006 about a lack of transparency. The only thing transparent these days are the democrats, we can see right through them.

Via memeorandum
H/T Michigan

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