Texas Attorney General Rules
Bush Gubernatorial Records Are Public
Texas Attorney General John Cornyn ruled May 3 that although it’s legal for President Bush to house his gubernatorial records at his father’s presidential library, they remain state property and are subject to Texas’s open-records law.
In 1997, when Bush was Texas governor, the state enacted a law that allowed governors to name alternate repositories for their official papers rather than the state archives commission, the New York Times reported May 4. The Texas Public Information Act states that a government agency typically has 10 days to respond to a request for documents; officials at the federally run Bush library said they could not be expected to comply with a state law and claimed that the turnaround time was too tight.
Cornyn, who ran for attorney general on an open-government platform in 1998, said the law gives the governor “the power to designate an alternate repository for his gubernatorial records,” but it grants “no other authority to alter the manner in which such records are preserved or made available to the public.”
Last November Bush signed an executive order allowing incumbent or former presidents to withhold the release of their presidential papers. The public-interest group Public Citizen filed a lawsuit to block Bush’s action, and a bill was introduced in Congress April 11 to rescind it.
Posted May 13, 2002.
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