Taking a stick to the GOP’s ‘transparency’ crusade.

When the Democrats announced that they would be forgoing conference committee proceedings and negotiating a final health care reform bill informally, critics pounced on President Barack Obama for violating his promise of greater transparency in government. And I, for one, had no great urge to defend him.

As a presidential candidate, Obama had not merely promised to introduce more transparency to government. He had very specifically, and very repeatedly, promised to conduct deliberations over health care “in front of the cameras on C-SPAN.” Although I never took the pledge literally--clearly, you can’t negotiate an entire bill in public view--plenty of voters did. Now Obama was paying a political price for the boast. I figured it was punishment for rhetorical hubris.

But then, on Wednesday, a press release from the Republican National Committee came across my desk. It contained a statement by Rep. Tom Price, Ga., chairman of the Republican Study Committee. “If the Democrats aren’t engaging in more nefarious backroom deal-making, why do they refuse to pull back the curtains and let the public see what’s going on?” Price said. “What are they doing that they don’t want us to see?”

To call that statement priceless is not just a bad pun. It’s a gross understatement. As you may recall, the previous administration--that is, the very Republican George W. Bush administration--had its own problems with transparency. Perhaps most famously, Vice President Richard Cheney convened a task force to help the administration design energy policy. People were naturally curious about what this task force was doing, particularly given the administration’s close ties to the petroleum industry, but Cheney wouldn’t even reveal who was on the task force, let alone open its proceedings to the public.

If Republican leadership was in high dudgeon then, I must have missed it.