Writers, Publishers Support Challenge
to Bush Order on Presidential Records
The Freedom to Read Foundation, the Association of American Publishers, and eight other groups representing writers and publishers filed an amicus brief February 28 in support of a Public Citizen lawsuit to block President Bush’s executive order restricting access to the records of incumbent or former presidents. The suit, filed by the public-interest group in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., claims that the order violates the 1978 Presidential Records Act making former presidents’ records public 12 years after they leave office.
The amicus brief states that the executive order “is not an implementation of the PRA, as it purports to be, but rather an unlawful attempt to render it void.” The brief adds, “At virtually every turn, it subverts the PRA’s core purpose of providing more—not less—public access to presidential records.”
“Against the tendency of those in power to distort and conceal”—demonstrated by Bush’s order and his withholding of 68,000 pages of President Reagan’s papers—“the work of historians and journalists in ‘keeping the record straight’ plays a pivotal role in the successful operation of our democratic system,” the brief concludes.
Also joining in the amicus brief are the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Association of American University Presses, PEN American Center, the Society of American Historians, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Authors Guild, and the Publishers Marketing Association.
Posted March 4, 2002.
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