If you went online to the website of the Indiana House last week, hoping to catch debate on the bill concerning Sunday sales of alcohol, you would have seen the seal of the state hanging on House chamber’s black marble wall with a message that said, “There is currently no live video stream.”
The session was supposed to start at around 9 a.m. on that final day to call bills for a final vote. Instead, on this day, your best bet was to move on to Facebook or Twitter or some other website (or actual work) because there would be no action until after lunch.
That’s because the House Republicans called a caucus meeting, one of those behind-closed-doors affairs where they are allowed to discuss anything and everything pertaining to, we assume, proposed legislation.
Reporters covering the Legislature then started sending out messages and eventually reporting that the Sunday sales bill was not going to be called, because it didn’t have enough votes to pass as amended with all sorts of regulations for the big-box retailers who would have to dramatically alter the way they sold alcohol if the legislation passed.
The problem here is with super majorities in both the House and Senate, all either body has to do is call for a caucus meeting and hash out matters of great importance to the people of Indiana. So, instead of nasty floor fights among themselves, Republicans simply call for a caucus, take test votes, we assume, and basically conduct the state’s business behind closed doors. Even if there aren’t nasty floor fights being avoided, we still do not get to hear our lawmakers’ positions on bills.
Why, you ask? Because they can.
When the Legislature adopted the Indiana Open Door Law in 1977, it exempted itself from the law. That’s right. You might expect your local school board, city council, county commissioners or even sewer district to conduct its business in public. You might even attend these meetings from time to time.
At the very least, you expect the news media to attend and report on these meetings so you might be able to read about what happened with school conduct policies, garbage contracts and the like.
Not so with the Legislature. The half dozen or so reporters who regularly cover the Statehouse were sitting around, waiting for the caucus to break because they — all of the public, for that matter — were shut out of the action, where, we would assume, important matters of state were being hashed out behind closed doors.
Don’t expect the Open Door Law to change any time soon. The Legislature has been able to conduct certain business in private for decades and is not about to change that now. The only way this will change is if the GOP loses its super-majority grip on both the House and Senate, and that’s not about to change anytime soon, either.