State Senator Bob Venables Calls on God for Help with Bloggers

The heat is on in the Delaware State Senate to finally drop the legal fraud of not defining itself as a public body and to subject itself to Delaware’s FOIA and open meeting laws. They are also getting well deserved heat to change the authoritarian rules by which the Senate operates—rules that, among other things, allow committee chairpersons to sit on legislation without holding committee hearings on them; allow committees to meet without the publication of an agenda, allow committees to hold “bone fide” hearings with a quorum of one member.

The first bit of evidence that the state Senate was feeling heat occurred last year when the President Pro Tem of the state Senate, Thurman “Slick and Slippery” Adams, told State Senator Karen Peterson that her FOIA bill, SB 4, would be, for the first time in 5 years, discussed in the Democratic State Senate Caucus...behind closed doors, of course.

Apparently, in a more recent development, Senator Adams has promised to give SB 4 a hearing in his Executive Committee.

Hiring former News Journal journalist Patrick Jackson is another indication that Senator Adams and his anti-democracy fellow travelers in the state senate are feeling pressure from uppity citizens and groups who have the temerity to believe they deserve open government in Delaware. The News Journal editorialist Ron Williams identified the citizens and advocacy groups as internet bloggers and the Council of Civic Organizations of Brandywine Hundred, which have “fueled this newspaper's [the News Journal’s] longtime effort to put the General Assembly under the FOIA.”

Although Adams described hiring Jackson as “another thing for open government,” few people doubt Adams hired Jackson to package the anti-democratic positions of Adams and his senatorial gang in as a publicly palatable form as possible. Although Jackson is a talented and much-respected writer, making the Adams gang’s totalitarian views acceptable to the public is an impossible task, one that would require supernatural intervention.

Fortuitously, on the first day of the legislative assembly, Senate member Bob Veneables called on God for help with bloggers and the media. He led the opening prayer in the Senate, during which he asked the Almighty to help bloggers and the media understand that each member of the senate had been elected by at least 40,000 voters in their district and they (the senators) know best how to operate the senate. The evident working assumptions of Veneable’s smug intercessory plea is that all the state senators had been democratically elected to run the state senate in its current undemocratic manner and, happily, the closed totalitarian system in the state senate is good for Delawareans. Only bloggers and the media have yet to grasp these important truths.

Of course all of that is pure hogwash. Most Delawareans don’t know their state senate operates in a closed, secretive and anti-democratic manner. But once they learn it, they overwhelmingly oppose it.

Some religious Delawareans, many with the OOGA brigade, who heard Veneables’ attempt to enlist the Almighty in the Adams gang’s anti-democratic scheme were offended by his prayer and considered it sacrilegious. Obviously Veneables and the rest of Adams gang not only have an archaic view of good and effective government, they are theologically primitive as well. On this matter most believers and agnostics would agree: if there is a being worthy of the name “God,” he or she would not side with the totalitarians in the state senate but with the people of Delaware who deserve an open state legislature.