Montanans' right to know should be held sacred

In the spirit of The Missoulian’s recently-adopted editorial terminology of huckleberries and chokecherries, I would like to award a fresh load of horse apples to the House Republicans’ laughable arguments that Montana’s open meetings laws no longer apply to party caucuses.

The arguments are those of House GOP lawyer Mark Parker, attempting to clean up the mess made by legislators caught red-handed, secretly caucusing in the basement of a Helena motel last month. Montana news media, including The Missoulian, filed a lawsuit to stop this nonsense.

It’s hard to decide which of Parker’s arguments smell riper, but we have to start somewhere. He claims that public notice of the meeting wasn’t necessary because the 1998 court order (that opened caucuses after a news media lawsuit) didn’t specifically order caucuses to give public notice of their meeting. Public notice of a meeting is an integral and indivisible part of the open meeting process for a basic reason—if the public doesn’t know about a meeting, people are not going to attend, and thus will not be able to exercise the right to know what is going on in a meeting of elected officials, a right guaranteed in Article 2, Section 9 of the Montana Constitution: “No person shall be deprived of the right to examine documents or to observe the deliberations of all public bodies or agencies of state government and its subdivisions, except in cases in which the demand of individual privacy clearly exceeds the merits of public disclosure.”

Second, Parker makes the bizarre argument that “a fresh group of legislators should have a fresh say” in the laws that apply to them. Legislators can’t willy-nilly ignore lawful orders to suit themselves. There’s this little thing called the Constitution that they have to smash first. To say that a district court order issued in 1998 doesn’t apply in 2014 is the height of absurdity. It is legal precedent that applies until the state supreme court, which has the ultimate constitutional authority, says it doesn’t. Courts regularly order legislatures to fulfill their responsibilities in terms of school funding, civil rights, redistricting and a host of other things. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if “fresh” legislators could shrug off previously-issued valid court orders?

Parker argues that what Montanans want more than anything is for their “trusted representatives to ‘go in a room and figure it out.’” Wrong. What Montanans want more than anything is for their Constitution to be honored. We want to preserve the right to know the deliberations of public bodies, including party caucuses, a part of the legislative process where important public-policy issues are discussed. We are not mushrooms and we refuse to be fed horse manure.