hard · LSAT Reading Comprehension
Defenders of open-plan legislative committee hearings argue that transparency deters the quiet trading of favors that closed sessions historically permitted. Yet committee staff in several jurisdictions that switched from closed to open markup sessions report a curious shift: substantive bargaining did not disappear but instead relocated to informal pre-hearing conversations that leave no public record at all. Under closed rules, at least the compromises struck were entered into a sealed transcript later released after a fixed embargo period, giving historians and, eventually, the public, a full account. Under open rules, the visible session often ratifies decisions already reached beyond any record's reach. The reform's proponents, in other words, may have secured immediate visibility at the cost of ultimate documentation.
The reference to the sealed transcript released after a fixed embargo period serves which one of the following functions in the passage?
- It confirms that the reform's proponents anticipated the shift to undocumented bargaining and designed the embargo period specifically to offset that risk.
- It demonstrates that closed sessions were, on balance, more transparent than open sessions in every jurisdiction that later adopted the reform under discussion.
- It identifies a safeguard the closed-session system provided that the open reform still fails to replicate, complicating the reform's own transparency rationale.
- It establishes that historians uniformly preferred the closed-session system because embargoed transcripts gave them exclusive early access to legislative bargaining.
- It proves that the informal pre-hearing conversations occurring under open rules are themselves later transcribed and released through a comparable embargo mechanism.
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