Shadow of the secret meeting spreading over more of our legislative processes

It is an overused cliche, dragged out whenever someone notices the haphazard way that bills really become laws:

“If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”

True? Perhaps. Cynical? Of course. But it is also rather unfair to sausages and sausage makers. Because unlike the makers of laws, butchers will let you watch if you have the desire and the stomach for it.

The Legislature exempted itself from the state Open Public Meetings Act that forces local governments and executive branch bodies to operate in public. The House and Senate are governed by only the rules the members themselves adopt.

Those rules are riddled with assertions that the legislative process be open. Notice must be given, meetings must be scheduled publicly, debate, deliberations and votes must be taken in public.

But all that is window dressing because of the existence of something called the caucus, where the parties spend long hours in secret to deliberate and even vote.

And since majority rules, the meetings of the majority caucuses are where all decisions are made.

Defenders of this system claim it is a tradition that is necessary for the timely completion of the Legislature’s business. But these same defenders will argue that state agencies and local governments must operate in a different, more open, manner.

I guess I can overlook the caucus meetings that precede and interrupt House and Senate floor sessions. They’ve gone on since statehood and eventually members come out in the open (though not the daylight since the skylights above the chambers were filled in). But the party caucus has been spreading like a virus from the floors of the House and Senate to the individual committees.

In more than three decades of covering the Legislature full- and part-time, I had seen only a few handfuls of closed committee caucuses. That has changed in the last half-dozen years or so. Where once such secret meetings were reserved to spending committees trying to keep a check on budget-busting amendments, the closed committee caucus is now common place in policy committees.

Why do it? Because they can. Given a choice between acting in secret and acting in public most politicians will act in secret. It’s safer. And as long as legislative leaders allow it, it will spread.

Tuesday I sat through a lengthy meeting of the House Education Committee hoping to see action on bills to advance the state’s chances of winning Race To The Top grants for schools.

Not once but three times the members broke into separate groups outside of public view and earshot. After the first, committee members returned to pass six bills with hardly any discussion. All but one was unanimous and it attracted just one negative vote.

After a second caucus, four of the five bills were unanimous. An indication of how intoxicating and widespread these secret meetings are is that they are used even for noncontroversial, unanimous bills.

Only after a third set of closed meetings that lasted well over an hour did committee members actually debate in public whether to delay yet again the math and science WASL requirement (they did by a 7-6 vote). Members also approved bills to enhance the evaluation of teachers and principals, finally try to improve the worst schools and open up teacher preparation programs.

As I have said, this process would be illegal if the Legislature were subject to the open meetings act. A majority of a local council could not legally meet in secret to deliberate and count votes (though some try). The Legislature, however, does it all the time.

Yet even the House’s and Senate’s own rules require that committee deliberations and votes be done in public. So where was the deliberation conducted on all those education bills, especially those on which there was no public discussion at all prior to unanimous votes being cast?

In private. In secret. In caucus.

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657

peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com

blog.thenewstribune.com/politics