Raghav Sharma | America Blog | May 11, 2015
President Obama takes great pride in referring to his administration as “the most transparent administration in history.” Long gone are the days when governments could easily keep secrets from their people. Well aware of what a post-WikiLeaks world entails, President Obama hopes to avoid the hullabaloo surrounding leaks (and the draconian manner in which his administration deals with whistleblowers) by being open about the dealings of his government.
Or so he would have us believe. For the reality is, from the failures of the military’s drone program to the frightening reach of the NSA’s surveillance policies, even “the most transparent administration in history” has a lot to hide. Nowhere is this more evident than in the negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional trade agreement nearly a decade in the making. As Robert Reich notes, the deal is massive in scope, “representing 792 million people and accounting for 40 percent of the world economy.” The details of the TPP have been negotiated behind closed doors, with the few non-government parties allowed a seat at the table being the corporations who stand to benefit the most from the deal. What little the public does know about the deal comes from leaked documents.
Even members of Congress are being kept in the dark about the deal, as evidenced by the fiasco faced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) when a member of his staff was denied access to the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), the executive agency responsible for advising the President on trade. President Obama has frequently said that the trade agreement’s critics are more than welcome to walk over to the USTR and read the text of the agreement; while that’s technically true if you limit “critics” to “critics who also happen to be members of Congress,” it’s incredibly misleading. As Mike Masnick of TechDirt writes:
Yes, members of Congress are allowed to walk over to the USTR and see a copy of the latest text. But they’re not allowed to take any notes, make any copies or bring any of their staff members. In other words, they can only read the document and keep what they remember in their heads. And they can’t have their staff members — the folks who often really understand the details — there to explain what’s really going on.
So although regulating foreign commerce is a responsibility delegated to the legislative branch by the Constitution, members of Congress are being kept in the shadows about what this trade deal will entail.
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rticle 1, Section 6 of the Constitution establishes an absolute free-speech right for members of Congress on the floor or in committee, even if they are disclosing classified material. It 
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