August 07, 2013 02:00 PM UTC

Hickenlooper: Bring Back The "Smoke-Filled Room?"

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

THURSDAY UPDATE: Gov. John Hickenlooper walks back clarifies his remarks in today's Denver Post:

"At no point did I suggest that we should embrace back rooms," he said, adding that he was telling the reporter about the ideas proffered by columnist Fareed Zakaria.

"If we're all bemoaning why there is this lockdown and inability to get bills passed or to have government function in Washington, this is a part of it," he said. "I'm not saying we go backwards, … but keep in mind there should be some other way to counterbalance this. I am not saying you go back into secrecy. I'm just pointing out this transparency creates problems. It's hard to argue that's not the case."

Tuesday's Time story that started the hubbub now updated as well:

Updated Wed. Aug. 7, 2013: ”The governor doesn’t support [bringing] back earmarks,” said Hickenlooper Communications Director Eric Brown.

—–

A fascinating tidbit from Time's Zeke Miller yesterday, reporting from the National Governor's Association conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Depending on your point of view, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper's most memorable quote coming out of this conference is either heroic Hickenlooper frankness or his biggest gaffe since "you can drink fracking fluid." We'll let you decide:

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a potential 2016 democratic candidate for president, has a creative — and controversial — idea for ending Washington, D.C.’s partisan gridlock: start legislating from behind closed doors and bring back the earmark.

After decades of fights for transparency in government, Hickenlooper told TIME that those well-intended initiatives are making government and lawmakers less effective. “We elect these people to make these difficult decisions, but now they are in the full light of video every time they make a decision,” Hickenlooper said at the National Governors Association meeting in Milwaukee, Wis. on Friday.  “We elected these people, let them go back into a room like they always did.” [Pols emphasis]

One Republican governor in attendance endorsed the idea on the condition he not be named. This seemingly counterintuitive opinion — that outcomes would improve if the process is obscured — is catching on in Washington among political elites of both parties as a way of making a dysfunctional Congress work again…

As the theory goes, earmarks and traditional pork-barrel negotiations gave ideological legislators a reason to stay invested in the process of crafting legislation. As anyone following American politics knows, that's a process that has almost totally broken down in recent years, especially the years since 2010 of a GOP-controlled House pitted against a Democratic Senate and White House. Miler of Time makes clear that restoring so-called "earmarks," which were banned by Speaker John Boehner after the GOP retook the House, is not on the agenda anytime soon. But it's a good question: did the "bad old days" of doing business in Washington actually get more done?

Go ahead and debate that while we peel our open government advocate friends off the ceiling.