The Mississippi Center for Justice is appealing a decision by the Mississippi Ethics Commission that ruled lawmakers can bar the public from attending closed-door meetings of the majority party. During this year’s legislative session, a reporter from the Mississippi Free Press attempted to attend one of these meetings of the House Republican Caucus but was forced to leave. Attorney Rob McDuff says the ruling by the ethics commission exempts parts of the legislature to the open meetings act.
McDuff says “For a few years now, the House Republicans who have a significant majority have been having private meetings to discuss public business, but the public can’t observe the meetings. They’re basically planning their agenda behind closed doors, and they enact that agenda with all of the meaningful discussion having been held in secret.”
House leadership has claimed that no policy decisions are made during these meetings, but in an October interview with the American Family Association Speaker of the House Phillip Gunn said a caucus meeting was the origin point for what became the state’s 15-week abortion ban.
Committee meetings in the House are open to the press for recording, but most of these meetings are not live-streamed. In the Senate, nearly all committee meetings and special hearings are broadcast online. During a press briefing yesterday, Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann was asked what he thought about the vote from the Ethics Commission.
Hosemann says “First of all I think that’s in litigation, so I’m not going to get into the litigation. I think they filed suit over it. Second of all, the Senate, everything we do here is open. Rather than say what I feel about it, look at what we do.”
Despite the ongoing litigation, McDuff says the legislature could act on it’s own to pass an amendment to the open meetings act removing the body’s exemption.
