Some Good News for a Change: The Rule of Law Is Still Operative

In a victory over the Bush administration's routine flouting of freedom of information act requests, a federal court has ordered the Internal Revenue Service to turn over audit statistics to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. For over 30 years, the Syracuse University-based TRAC had published detailed analyses of IRS audits, documenting the agency's turn from going after the big guys.

TRAC is run by Susan Long and David Burnham, a former New York Times reporter. They use publicly available data to show how government regulatory agencies have retreated from performing their legislatively-mandated functions. In 2004, the Bush administration began denying their FOIA requests for data that had been routinely provided for decades. Their lawyers at Public Citizen sued to uphold the law.

Yesterday's decision in the western district of Washington by Judge Marsha Pechman is a welcome sign that the judiciary branch is starting to do its job. Someone has to rein in an administration that routinely breaks the law.