Watergate blowback: the White House's ongoing battle against post-Nixon sunshine laws.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Columns

IN NOVEMBER 1974, a reform-hungry Capitol Hill gave the newly sworn-in President Gerald Ford one of his first real challenges. Congress had passed a significant expansion of Ralph Nader's 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), aimed at prying open for public scrutiny the previously exempt areas of national security and law enforcement. When Ford was vice president to a commander-in-chief famous for his secrecy, paranoia, and abuse, he had supported the new sunshine amendments. But as chief executive, the interim president allowed himself to be talked into a veto by his intelligence directors and by his young chief and deputy chief of staff: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

"This was their first battle at Ford's White House," says Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive (NSA), a nonprofit at George Washington University that has helped declassify more than 20,000 government documents. It was a battle the FOIA foes lost: Congress overrode Ford's veto.

Thirty years later, Rumsfeld and Cheney are again squaring off against the advocates of government transparency. At press time, the Bush White House had yet to release the photographs and videos of the vile prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib; it's also defending its expansions of state secrecy in several cases before the Supreme Court. Its efforts are affecting not just Congress' and the press's ability to cross-examine the executive branch but citizens' ability to scrutinize how our tax money is being spent--and the government's ability to act without restraint.

"This administration just has a very fundamental opposition to the disclosure of records about government operation," says Tom Fitton, president of the watchdog group Judicial Watch. (Motto: "Because no one is above the law!") "I think the administration's general view is they'd like to see the end to all disclosure laws.... Barring that, they're fighting within the confines of executive privilege and secrecy."

Judicial Watch, as you may recall from the 1990s, came into national prominence with a series of lawsuits to pry loose documents relating to "Filegate," "Chinagate," "E-Mailgate," and other Clinton scandals. "We're conservative --we're suspicious of big government," Fitton says. "I'm not aware of government secrecy as a conservative principle."

But as has become increasingly manifest during the course of George W. Bush's term, secrecy certainly has become a governing principle. Example: From fiscal year 2001 to...