Candid camera: Reporter Shane Castle videotaped a secret—and most likely illegal—meeting of Montana House Republicans on Thursday. This is a still from the video, A link to the video is in the story.
For the record, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to prohibit Montana legislators from caucusing in private.
I’m all for the public’s right to know, for making public documents available to the public, for making sure public bodies conduct their business in public. But caucuses? Traditionally those have been strategy-setting sessions involving members of a political party. Making caucuses public is like allowing the defense to sit in on the offense’s huddle.
When the Montana Supreme Court ruled in the 1990s that caucuses were like all other meetings of public officials and had to remain open under the strong “right to know” provisions of the Montana Constitution, I did not join my journalistic colleagues in raising a cheer.
I simply believed that legislators needed some degree of privacy in deciding among themselves how to get things done. There is enough partisan gridlock in this country already. Why make it even harder to operate the complicated machinery of lawmaking?
Ed Kemmick
But I also realize that people trying to understand how lawmakers arrive at legislation are at a big disadvantage if they can’t attend caucuses, especially if the legislature is dominated by one party. A party with a veto-proof majority would end up conducting most of its real business in caucus rather than on the floor of the House or Senate.
It is a complicated issue. I did not, however, think the court was wrong in its ruling on caucuses. The constitution guarantees open meetings of “all public bodies or agencies of state government and its subdivisions,” and the only exception is in cases where “the demand of individual privacy clearly exceeds the merits of public disclosure.”
There is no individual privacy at issue when a political party caucuses, so there’s no reason to blame the court, or to accuse it of judicial activism. But if legislators agree with me that private caucuses are good for the efficient functioning of government, they can try to regain that right by amending the constitution.
What they cannot do is simply ignore the law. But that is just what Montana’s House Republicans did Thursday when about 50 of them caucused in the basement of a Helena hotel and restaurant.
Newly elected House member Jeff Essmann, of Billings, an attorney who was president of the state Senate during the 2013 session, made the absurd argument that the meeting was legal because it wasn’t held in a public building.
Peter Michael Meloy, a Helena attorney who represents the Montana Freedom of Information Hotline, said a meeting of a quorum of any public body is a meeting that has to be noticed to the public, period, which is a no-brainer.
Well, I’m not a lawyer, but if a case like this ever goes to court and Essmann wants to place money on the outcome, I do wish he’d contact me.
Fortunately, two reporters were tipped off and attended the caucus. They were John Adams of the Great Falls Tribune and Shane Castle, who recently pulled the plug on his independent weekly, the Helena Vigilante, while he seeks to form a nonprofit online investigative journalism venture.
Castle has posted a 14-minute video he filmed at the caucus, during which Essmann made a series of rather flimsy arguments. At one point he said, “I think the critical question is whether democracy is improved or hindered if people can’t have frank discussions.”
That may be a critical reason why legislators should seek to change the law, but it is a terrible reason to break existing laws. A lot of people think laws criminalizing recreational marijuana use are very bad, but they indulge anyway, knowing the risks.
If a pot smoker got busted he could tell the cop, or the judge, “I think the critical issue here is whether an adult should be allowed to decide what substances he is going to introduce into his own body.” I happen to agree, but good luck with that.
If you’ve got 14 minutes, watch the whole video. It’s quite informative. The video also suggests that incoming House Majority Leader Rep. Keith Regier, R-Kalispell, might have been genuinely confused in calling the caucus. He fumbles a bit at first, arguing that the meeting was not really “closed.”
“If I wanted this closed, I’d say ‘get out of here,’ or whatever,” he says, apparently unable at that point to grasp the difference between “closed” and “undisclosed to the public.” But at least he keeps talking to the reporters and eventually seems to agree with them that the idea was a mistake.
He later apologized for the caucus to Chuck Johnson, with the Lee newspapers’ state bureau.
Essmann and Regier also tried arguing that the caucus wasn’t really a caucus because nothing was discussed. They only passed out a questionnaire to gauge what members wanted to accomplish during the session, they said.
Sure. If that’s all they had wanted to do they could have passed out the questionnaire at the Capitol. Instead, they handed all the Republican legislators a private note letting them know about that evening’s non-caucus caucus. The whole thing, right down to the passing of notes, was very juvenile and not very smart.
The Legislature doesn’t convene for seven more weeks. Lets hope the party in control of both chambers gets the simple stuff figured out before it takes on the more serious business of the state.
Addendum: I just have to add this. When U.S. Sen. Jon Tester was named to head the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee last week, Bowen Greenwood, executive director of the Montana Republican Party (who resigned for completely unrelated reasons soon after) released a statement that said, in part: “Once upon a time, Jon Tester promised to make Washington look a little more like Montana. It’s hard to see that happening when he takes a job that’ll have him shuttling back and forth between New York and L.A., hobnobbing with the liberal elite.”
I just shook my head. “Such boilerplate hackery!” I said to myself. “Why can’t these political operatives at least say something original for once?”
Then, in the AP story on the Republicans’ private caucus, I read this quote from Montana Democratic Party spokesman Bryan Watt: “It’s no surprise Republican leaders are hiding in smoke-filled back rooms to keep their out-of-touch, reckless agenda from the people of Montana.”
In the world of boilerplate hackery, “smoke-filled back rooms” is about as hackneyed as it gets. Come on, fellas.
