At a glance
Who: Indiana lawmakers
What: Keep debate and reasons for voting out of the public eye through secret caucus meetings
Who cares: This secrecy leaves the public in the dark on what and who influence their representatives votes on major issues
What will happen to HJR-3
The resolution will be read for the third time in Indiana’s general assembly. If it passes it will then be tabled until 2015 when it can be voted whether it will got to a public vote.
• Debate on HJR-3 made primarily in private caucus meetings.
• This leaves the public in the dark about their representatives reasons for voting.
• Although most debate is closed, some lawmakers host public debates and forums.
INDIANAPOLIS — Over the past week, Indiana’s senators debated a proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage, going over the merits for hours at a time, before deciding a ban shouldn’t appear on the ballot in November. But their reasoning remains largely a mystery to the public, which heard from only one senator during public deliberations.
The gay marriage fight has illuminated one of the less-reported aspects of Indiana’s General Assembly: debate on the toughest of issues often happens in private caucus meetings of state lawmakers, with much left unsaid in public.
The Senate’s decision to not debate the issue publicly — only Senate Minority Leader Tim Lanane, D-Anderson, spoke publicly — leaves a cloak of secrecy that only makes residents more wary of politicians, said Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana, which fought to get the ban placed on the ballot in November.
“I think it makes people more cynical of politics,” Clark said.
Supporters of the ban, House Joint Resolution 3, often felt like they were outgunned from the start, despite promises from legislative leaders that the vote would go their way as it had in 2011. Indiana law requires constitutional amendments to pass two consecutive biennial sessions of the Legislature before being placed on a ballot.
Clark said the public was left on the sidelines this year as major campaign donors and businesses supporting Freedom Indiana, the umbrella group that successfully blocked the ban this year, claimed most of the spotlight.
“I think that further disenfranchises people and makes them think this is nothing but a political game in Indianapolis,” he said. “We worry about why people don’t vote, why they don’t get involved in the electoral process, why they don’t run for office — they think the system is rigged.”
But not all of the debate occurred behind closed doors.
House Republicans spent much of January in private meetings debating a second sentence to the proposed amendment that barred civil unions and raised questions about whether employers would be prohibited from offering benefits to same-sex couples.
While they didn’t comment on those discussions, House lawmakers did hold an impassioned public debate, in which many spoke of their personal faith and struggles with the issue before voting to strip that sentence from the amendment.
The Senate, which supported the House’s version, will still have a shot to lay out its reasoning Monday, when the ban comes up for a final vote in that chamber. But if senators follow last week’s example, the public may never know what happened to sway them.
Senate President Pro Tempore David Long, R-Fort Wayne, isn’t shedding any light on the caucus discussions. He even took Sen. Mike Delph to task for tweeting about the meeting.
“We can’t talk about caucus,” Long said. “Just so you know on this one thing, it’s our rule that we don’t discuss what goes on in caucus. You know, that’s private, and to the extent that anything was said today, that’s a breach of our normal protocol.”
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