Credit where it is due

Obama will not likely do many things I agree with, by the way I hope I am wrong about that, butI doubt I am. Today, though he did something I agree with

President Barack Obama, in his first full day in office, revoked a controversial executive order signed by President Bush in 2001 that limited release of former presidents’ records.

The new order could expand public access to records of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the years to come as well as other past leaders, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

“It’s extraordinary that a new president would address this issue on his first full day in office,” Aftergood said. “It signifies the great importance he attaches to open, accountable government. The new order suggests President Obama will take a narrow view of executive privilege and assert it in a much more limited way than what we’ve seen in the recent past.”

Under Bush’s order, former presidents had broad ability to claim executive privilege and could designate others including family members who survive them to exercise executive privilege on their behalf.

And in poking around I found that I am not the only Conservative who is pleased. Of course some others are not so certain

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Posted on January 22, 2009, in Politics. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a Comment.

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