Rep. Douglas Aagard's attempt to close legislators' e-mail to the public is misguided and dangerous to a free society.

The Kaysville Republican says that House Bill 12 -- which would classify correspondence between the public and lawmakers as private -- would protect the public's First Amendment right to petition government for redress of grievances. Aagard argues that people may not be willing to send e-mail to their elected representatives if they knew the media or others could publicize it.

This shows a deep misunderstanding of the First Amendment, which was never intended to facilitate letter writing to government. It has nothing to do with whether communications should be public or private, nor anything to do with the means by which people convey their ideas.

The First Amendment only bars government from punishing dissenters. Among other things, it says that government shall make no law abridging the right of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances.

But in a very real sense, H.B. 12 does exactly that by hiding issues of potentially great public importance. By making communications between a constituent and an elected leader secret, citizens will never know whether they ought to be exercising their own right to petition government either for or against a measure being raised.

Aagard's measure violates another tenet of good government: transparency. Government works best when the people can see how decisions are made. It guarantees that elected officials are acting in the public good and not for the benefit of a special interest.

By hiding constituent correspondence, staff memos and other communications, H.B. 12 creates a kind of smoke-filled room in which bills are created and deals cut outside of public view. It impedes the public's ability to hold their representatives accountable.

Without knowing the genesis of a particular bill, the public cannot know whether the measure was crafted at the behest of a special interest seeking preferential treatment or members of the public pointing out a problem that needed to be fixed.

A broader question is who owns the government? From Aagard's perspective, the government is the Legislature. But in reality, the public is the government. It is from the people that the Legislature derives its power. When one asks the government for help with a problem, he is not asking an elected official for a personal favor; he seeking help from the public, which the elected official represents. Therefore the public has an interest in both the petition and how its representatives handle it.

H.B. 12 dissolves that social contract and presumes that elected officials know better than their constituents. It shields their acts from view, and thereby makes them less accountable to the people who elected them.

Aagard also presumes to take upon himself the position of a super-editor, something the First Amendment specifically prohibits. His bill assumes that the press will publish every scrap of e-mail that a legislator receives. In truth, few messages are newsworthy. But on those occasions that communications deal with matters of public interest, H.B. will shroud them in secrecy. No one would even know they existed, so an appeal for public release would never come up.

H.B. 12 has been passed out of the Senate's Government Operations Committee and now goes to the full Senate. We urge the senators to yield to statesmanship and let this bill die.