For use Sunday, March 14

‘Sunshine’ law critics need to keep Jefferson in mind

In a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette in 1823, former president Thomas Jefferson wrote: “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.”

And Jefferson, at the age of 80, with a lifetime of public and government service behind him, knew something of the force of public opinion and the agitation it produces.

In fact, some of the politician and statesman’s biographers note that he and his reputation had taken quite a beating at the hands of a press that peddled gossip and outright lies, displaying a total disregard for the damage they were doing to him.

Despite his excoriation at the hands of the press, the same biographers note, our third president remained a true believer in the notion that newspapers operating in an atmosphere that was conducive to the free flow of ideas would ultimately ferret out the truth and enlighten the citizenry.

Jefferson never lost his belief in the idea that allowing any government regulation of the press posed a danger that the same government would eventually take complete control of the information available to the electorate and their access to it.

He expressed that sentiment in a letter written in 1786 to John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it,” Jefferson wrote to Jay while the pair were serving as delegates to the Continental Congress.

That was the same concept that was incorporated into the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified the same year that Jefferson wrote a letter to Edward Carrington, a politician and statesman who was serving at that time as a delegate from Virginia to the Continental Congress.

“The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them,” the future president wrote to Carrington.

For newspapers to fulfill the role Jefferson envisioned for them as guardians of Americans’ newly found and hard-won freedom, they would need unfettered access to the deliberations of their governmental bodies as well as to the records of those proceedings.

For nearly a couple of centuries after the First Amendment was ratified, disputes over which proceedings were open to the public (and the press) and which records the public and media could inspect were made by the courts on a case-by-case basis.

All of that began to change with passage of the federal Freedom of Information Act, which was signed into law in 1966 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was substantially amended in 1974 and 1976.

Florida became one of the first states to enact its own “Government in the Sunshine” law In 1967, bringing its own open records and open meetings statutes into compliance with the federal FOIA.

Since then, the Sunshine State’s “Sunshine Law” has become one of the strongest in the nation, leading to constant attacks by elected officials and government bureaucrats who would prefer that the government’s business be conducted out of sight of the electorate.

Therefore, on this Sunshine Sunday, when we celebrate the state’s open meetings and records statutes, we have just one piece of advice for those who would attempt to declaw those laws in Florida.

Ask yourself, “What would Jefferson do?”

Reproduced courtesy of The Villages Daily Sun.
Permission is granted to reprint in part or whole when The Villages Daily Sun is credited as the source.
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