Of the scores of issues with which the Mississippi Legislature has been dealing this year, Medicaid expansion is at or near the top of the list.
The House wants to get in step with what the vast majority of states have done and expand the government insurance program to cover as many people as federal law allows. The Senate wants a more limited expansion, even if it ends up costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars more a year.
The two chambers will try to work out their differences in a conference committee, and both have agreed that these negotiations will occur in full public view.
That’s commendable, but rather than such openness being unusual, it should be common. All conference committee meetings, not just those in which the stakes are huge, should be conducted in the open.
It’s a disservice to the public — and to most lawmakers — for the Legislature to do the meat of its work with only a handful of people knowing what’s going on.
Almost all major pieces of legislation wind up going to conference because it’s rare for the House and Senate to agree on every detail of a proposal. It’s in these conference committees where three negotiators appointed from each chamber try to work out their differences, and occasionally sneak in provisions that stray far from the intent of the original bills. Sometimes rank-and-file lawmakers are caught as much off guard as the general public, and they wind up voting for provisions they would not normally support because those who served on the conference committee did their work in private and did not fully explain what changes were made during the negotiations.
Such lack of transparency goes against the spirit of the state’s Open Meetings Act, which the Legislature adopted decades ago but to whose standards it does not always hold itself.
The Senate, under Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, has been more open to openness. The House appears to be moving in that direction since Rep. Jason White took over as speaker, but it still wants to leave the door open for informal and private conference committee work, in which the negotiators haggle by phone, email and texting.
The argument for this arrangement is what it has always been, even before the invention of smartphones and other high-speed communications technology: namely, that in the rush of the final weeks and days of a legislative session, when most of the conference committee work is done, there is not time to hold open meetings and give proper notice.
If that’s true, it’s only because of the tendency of legislators to procrastinate and to tackle more than they should.
If conference committee meetings had to be held in the open without exception, lawmakers would be forced to adjust: first by being better organized and not leaving so much to the last minute, and second by dealing with less.
Legislators and those who lobby them act as if there is a law for every perceived ill. As a result, they spend a lot of time dealing with matters of minor importance or with proposals that are not well thought-out.
If the time constraints of open conference committees were to result in fewer laws being enacted, much of the public would welcome the unintended consequence.
