Why won’t the Montana Legislature play by the rules?

Yet another judge just found the Montana Legislature in violation of the Montana Constitution. This time it attempted to ignore the Constitution’s very clear “right-to-know” provision regarding the public’s right to observe the actions of government — including making the laws we all have to live by.
Simply put, the Republicans have controlled the legislative majorities for many years now, as well as the governor’s office and every statewide office. That gives them dang near total control over the state and the ability to do almost anything they wish with the law, budgets, programs, and the health and welfare of all Montanans.
The salient word is “almost.”
Other than the constitutional sidebars, which indeed are there to protect the people from the government, it’s pretty much wide open for whatever changes the majority party wants to make.
Moreover, the first thing that anyone dealing with the Legislature learns is that you have to know the rules. In fact, every legislative session votes on the rules that govern their actions.
What most people don’t know is that the Legislature gets to make its own rules — and when you control both chambers with large majorities, as well as the Rules Committees of both the Senate and House, you can change them any way you want as long as they conform to the Constitution’s mandates and prohibitions.
The GOP-controlled Legislature now has a rather long and undistinguished record of its unconstitutional laws being overturned by both Montana district and Supreme Court decisions — as well as the recent decision by the US Supreme Court to decline the state’s appeal on two laws that were overturned because they would restrict Montanans’ voting rights.
The latest case the Legislature lost, however, was on whether the public has the right to view the background information on bills. As Cascade County District Judge John Kutzman succinctly summed it up in his ruling: “It is about documents held in public files maintained on public servers by public employees at public expense.”
For 50 years the public has had the right to inspect all the information that goes into a bill — including the bill requester and who was active in the bill drafting process; for exmaple, which special interests, lobbyists, and “think tanks” influenced the bills, suggested language, provided data, etc.
As Kutzman wrote: “The only qualification in the constitutional right to examine public documents is ‘when the demand of individual privacy clearly exceeds the merits of public disclosure.’ No one in this case suggests the case has anything to do with anyone’s right of individual privacy. Similarly, nothing in the constitutional language requires the person who wants to examine public documents to agree not to use that information to publicly criticize the legitimacy or validity of government action.”
Given that the GOP majorities control all the actions of every bill from drafting to when it’s voted into law (or not), what possible difference could it make if the public knows details on the drafting process? And why was that worth yet again trying to operate in secrecy and ignoring the clear mandates of the Montana Constitution?
There’s no need to kid anyone.
The Republicans are totally in charge of Montana with virtually unlimited power providing they stay within the sidebars of the Constitution and honor our “inalienable rights” — which by the way, is exactly what our right-to-know provision is. The GOP holds all the cards — so why can’t they just play by the rules like the rest of us have to?
