We have received seventeen responses so far.
The seventeenth response was quite a story in itself. So, let me tell you about it. There's this place in the Western portion of the United States called Wyoming, and it has a Governor who calls himself Matt Mead. The state has a very poor reputation for transparency when it comes to FOIA document requests (45th in the country), so we expected some pushback.
On March 10, 2015 the Office of Wyoming Governor Matt Mead received our FOIA requests. Seven days later, the Special Counsel for the Governor of Wyoming sent us the letter pictured below, with a final sentence that could have been, "These aren't the droids you're looking for."
What manner of gobbledygook is this: "The Office of the Governor is not the custodian of records that may be responsive to your request"? Well, if he thought his Jedi Mind Tricks would work on Support the Dream Defenders, he was mistaken. We sent a letter right back asking him, if the Office of the Governor didn't have records pertaining to the Office of the Governor, then who had them?
Thinking that perhaps his Jedi Mind Trick would work this time, the Governor's Special Counsel shot back:
Well, that was enough footsie for us, so we sent an immediate reply, which we like to call our "Lawsuit to follow" letter. In it, we explained that we wanted the documents in the Governor's office that are responsive to our requests, or we wanted a definitive, "No, we have no such records." We gave the Special Counsel seven days upon receipt of the letter to reply, or we would file suit in the District Court in Laramie, Wyoming.
Our group prepared the lawsuit, but it became moot when the Special Counsel lay down like an old bird dog:
As you can see, we finally got our response, and it is much as we expected: Governor Matt Mead cares nothing about the number of people he's killing and bankrupting. Our slightly hardball tactics not only garnered the response we wanted (and expected), but the Governor's Special Counsel reiterated his answer twice in that last paragraph:
The sweet smell of victory! It's like your opponent saying, "We surrender, and, oh, by the way, you know that we concede defeat, right?"
Alabama on Our Minds
Now, that was a nice chapter in this story, but we need your help to reach a happy ending in our book. We need a volunteer in Alabama to re-send an FOIA request to Governor Bentley. The state of Alabama has a residency requirement for FOIA requests, which means that we need a volunteer who lives in Alabama to send the request to his or her Governor. Do you have the time to help out 325,000 of your fellow Alabamians who would receive health care with a Medicaid Expansion? Please send me a private message or volunteer in the comments below. Thank you.