The Mississippi judge who upheld this month a head-scratching interpretation of the state’s Open Meetings Act did so based on his assumption that state lawmakers would not have written a bill with redundant language.
That’s a huge assumption to make, given how many times lawmakers over the years have had to come back and clean up laws on the books that are confusing or ambiguous.
As it now stands, though, the state Legislature as a whole is not defined as a “public body” under the open meetings law, according to the Mississippi Ethics Commission and Hinds County Chancellor J. Dewayne Thomas. Thus, a majority of state lawmakers can legally meet in secret, if they so choose, for any reason except when there are open floor sessions.
Every other government body in the state — from town boards to state boards and commissions — is a “public” body, but not so the Legislature.
Such an interpretation hinges on how one reads the definition of a “public body,” as contained in the Open Meetings Act. One part of the definition says it is any “policymaking entity or committee thereof” — which should clearly include the Legislature — but later in that same sentence singles out for inclusion “any standing, interim or special committee of the Mississippi Legislature.”
Thomas ruled that the Legislature would not have included that language about legislative committees except as a way to specify that only those committees, and not the whole Legislature, is covered by the law.
One other possible explanation, though, is that the writers of the bill felt it necessary to make clear which committees in the state Legislature are covered, since another part of the law exempts legislative subcommittees and conference committees.
Which gatherings of state lawmakers the Open Meetings Act covers has become an issue because of a practice, first started by former House Speaker Philip Gunn and continued by his successor, Jason White, to hold meetings of all the Republican House members in secret, where they discuss issues and legislation outside of public view. The Ethics Commission’s executive director, Tom Hood, agreed with complainants that this practice wasn’t legal, since those meetings constitute a quorum of the Legislature. Unfortunately, the board to which Hood reports didn’t follow his recommendation, and now Thomas has given that controversial interpretation his concurrence.
The Mississippi Free Press has vowed to appeal the case further up the judicial chain.
Of course, the Legislature could fix this problem by cleaning up the ambiguous section in the Open Meetings Act. Don’t hold your breath that this will happen. At least one chamber likes the ambiguity just as it is and obviously plans to continue taking advantage of it.
