Secrecy has its place, but not in redistricting

Secrecy is a valued concept when the subject is birthday or Christmas shopping, or when surprise parties are hatched. Try it in the halls of a democratic-republican government, however, and you're asking for trouble.

At least, the surprise party Utah House Republicans planned for Democrats and the rest of the state when they unveiled the map dividing the state into four congressional districts did not conjure scenes of party hats, cake and bubbly punch. It was more like a scene from junior high, where a bunch of cool kids secretly decide to conspire against the rest.

Before I go too far down this road, I don't wish to overplay the metaphors. The four new congressional districts are 72 percent, 65 percent, 74 percent and 62 percent Republican, according to voting records. The message there is that Utah Democrats have problems much larger than their inability to control the redistricting process every 10 years. It may be physically impossible to draw a contiguous district that is both one-fourth of the state and majority Democrat.

Also, few people are complaining about the way the state House and Senate districts were drawn. Nor was the final map a complete surprise. It wasn't that much different from previous maps that were made public, and the process included public hearings and other opportunities for input.

But the way the House redrew things near the end behind closed doors cast a pall over the whole process.

Despite how many people, including a lot my journalistic colleagues, may feel, secrecy is not always the enemy of good government. The Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution in secret. States had sent delegates to that convention with instructions to revise the Articles of Confederation, not organize an entirely new government, and there were many delicate issues to work through.

And right now in Washington a bipartisan group of lawmakers known as the "supercommittee" is secretly trying to draw a map for getting the nation out from under its massive federal debt.

This has caused no shortage of conniptions in the nation's capital and beyond. The New York Times quoted Utah Sen. Mike Lee as decrying the secrecy, saying, "I am not aware of any situation where a legislative committee responsible for matters of such profound sweeping importance operates in secret."

But in the same newspaper a week later, Jordan Tama, an assistant professor of international relations at American University, made the compelling argument that there are several examples, including the way Social Security was reformed during Ronald Reagan's presidency and the 9/11 Commission, which sought to assign blame for allowing the terrorist attacks to proceed undetected.