Dec 9, 2014 2 min read

If you’re a lame-duck lawmaker who’s just a few weeks from retirement, it can be a time of either lassitude or mischief.

You can clean out your desk, box up papers for a university archive back in your home state and bask in all the glowing summations of your long career. Or, if you’re U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the exiting West Virginia Democrat who’s bringing the curtain down on a half-century of public service, you can inexplicably gum up the works on an almost-universally hailed, bipartisan measure that would expand the public’s right to know.

A bill adding several important reforms to the Freedom of Information Act, including provisions that would constrict some of the wiggle room agencies have to not provide information and lower potentially prohibitive costs, was sailing to easy Senate passage late last week when Rockefeller suddenly placed a hold on the bill. In a statement, he said the bill would potentially hinder the federal government’s ability to pursue financial fraud cases and possibly allow the perpetrators to “obstruct and delay investigations,” but didn’t offer concrete details about how that would happen or what could be done to fix it.

However, after a weekend of arm-twisting, Rockefeller relented and the bill glided through the Senate on Monday with no further objections. When asked why he backtracked, Rockefeller spoke in riddles: “It’s sort of the internal workings of the Senate,” he told a reporter, before admitting, “It’s an indecipherable phrase which I’ve given you.”

Apparently wishing to continue on this stream of vagueness, Rockefeller concluded, “Various pieces of the puzzle worked well – how’s that?”

Rockefeller’s wish, in the closing hours of his career, is apparently not to leave us cheering or booing, but utterly baffled.