David Skaggs: “This proposal will not hurt national security. What will it do? It will enhance our responsibility to the American…”

“This proposal will not hurt national security. What will it do? It will enhance our responsibility to the American public for them to have as much information as possible about their government. And I think it is irrelevant whether we get asked at town meetings about this. I happen to, actually. And what does the American public learn? They have a sense of proportion: How much of our resources are we putting to this purpose? They have, I would concede, no particular need to know the details of particular sub-agencies. But it is a legitimate matter for them to have a sense in this large sense what their government is about in the intelligence field relative to other things that they spend their tax money for. Really all that we have by way of argument against this proposal is the slippery slope argument. What does that really mean? It means that we do not trust future Congresses to exercise judgment about what will and what will not protect the national security of this country. I think that is a highly rude position to take relative to our successors in these jobs. They will be able to figure this out. They will know whether or not further disclosures make any sense. I do not think that they will err in that judgment, and we can trust them to do so.”