It’s no surprise that a Republican-dominated committee of the Mississippi Legislature would produce a congressional redistricting plan designed to maintain the party’s hold on three of the state’s four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
But we’re glad to see a coalition of groups challenging the secretive manner in which the redistricting plan was developed.
Sure, the Joint Legislative Redistricting Committee went through the motions of being transparent, as it held nine public meetings across the state this year to solicit feedback in advance, but the real meat of its work appears to have been done behind closed doors. How else could the committee have had a proposed plan ready to be approved so quickly on Wednesday?
Almost certainly there were alternative plans at which the committee looked, as it had to decide what to do with the 2nd Congressional District, long occupied by Bennie Thompson, which had lost population over the past decade. The public should have been privy to what those possible configurations were, rather than only being able to watch the joint committee rubber-stamp a plan on which its members had already agreed.
Here’s the crux of the issue.
Mississippi has an open meetings law with too many exemptions. One of the broadest exempts all legislative subcommittees and conference committees from the law’s provisions. That is how the Legislature, if it chooses, can keep the public in the dark about what it is doing until it is too late for anyone to do much about it.
The question is whether a joint committee of the Legislature’s two chambers falls under either one of these exempt categories. The seven groups that joined forces to file a complaint with the state Ethics Commission would say it does not.
We agree. The joint legislative group’s name specifies that it is a committee, not a subcommittee. And unlike a conference committee, which includes three members of each chamber to hash out differences in related proposals that each chamber has passed, the joint legislative committee had no underlying legislation on which it was working. It was, in fact, starting from scratch.
Although some legislative leaders have been progressive in recent times to open up their deliberations, even when technically they could have closed them, there is still too much that happens in secret at the Capitol. A ruling by the Ethics Commission in the complainants’ favor could be far-reaching. It would not just apply to how congressional maps are drawn but how all types of legislation are crafted.
- The Greenwood Commonwealth
