James Hamlin

While they may be necessary in situations where information disclosed would be detrimental to national security if publicly known, secret hearings are often used for other purposes. I read a bit of Michael Parenti's Democracy for the Few, and it points to a specific situation where a bill for an 8 billion dollar corporate tax cut was drawn up after two days of secret Appropriations Committee sessions, one hour of debate, and passed by (this was confusing to me) 30 members of the House without a roll-call vote. That last part I may have misinterpreted, as I don't have the book on me right now, and it would seem that a quorum would be around 2/3 or something similar. Anyway, the point was that not only can information be kept from the public, but entire pieces of legislation can be passed semi-secretly. Also, there is a double standard for these secret hearings. Industries and utilities may be informed of developments while the public is kept in the dark.

They simply keep the legislature unaccountable. I feel that even in many cases where national security and defense is discussed, it would do no harm to let the public know what is going on.

So, I'm curious. What is the constitutionality of Secret Congressional Hearings?

copernicus

James, you raise good questions, but there is an abstraction here that is worth thinking about. What exactly does "rule of law" mean, and how does it come about? The old Soviet Union had a constitution with some very liberal ideas about personal freedoms. The execution of laws was completely undermined by the public institutions that wielded power in the Soviet Union. Courts would not defend the rights of individuals on the grounds that the Soviet constitution protected their freedoms.

The situation in the US is different, but only in a matter of degree. Our legal precedents have increasingly tended to interpret law as favoring individual rights. Yet we now find ourselves in a situation where the public at large feels insecure and threatened by outside forces. So courts suddenly become more likely to weigh the interests of public security over those of individual rights. Habeas corpus is now interpreted as a civil right with limited applications. Government secrecy now finds itself exempted from legal scrutiny.

The advantage for most of us is that we feel better able to deal with the perceived external threats. The disadvantage is that we ignore the less easily perceived internal threats. When power is concentrated in the hands of the few, they will use it to secure and perpetuate their hold on power. The rest of us cling to the illusion that those who hold power will continue to look out for our interests, and not their own. Or maybe the illusion is just that public interests coincide with the interests of those in power. So we become less vigilant.