This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Republicans in the Utah Legislature have to come to grips with their success. In this reddest of red states, voters have given the GOP a "supermajority" in both houses of the Legislature, meaning the party has the numbers to override a veto by the governor, who is also a Republican.

That has earned the GOP the driver's seat in Utah, but it hasn't earned them the right to hide what they're doing.

On Tuesday, attorneys for the Utah Media Coalition ­— a group of most news organizations in the state, including The Salt Lake Tribune — sent a letter to the leaders in both houses saying their closed party caucuses violate the spirit if not the letter of the state's open meetings law. That law says that if a government body meets to make decisions, they need to tell people they're doing that and let them in to see it.

But the law has one loophole. It allows party members of such a government body to gather privately to plan strategy, a reasonable exemption if we were fully functioning two-party state.

Instead, the loophole lets the GOP supermajorities meet to discuss more than just strategy. They can essentially decide everything out of the public's view, and then rubberstamp it in open session later. The public is denied both the debate of what their elected leaders want to do with their tax money and the ability to see how their own individual legislators voted.

The low point in this private lawmaking came this year when Rep. Greg Hughes, speaker of Utah House of Representatives, twice refused to consider plans for expanding Medicaid in open session after polls had shown a majority of Utahns favored it. (In fact, it was supported by the health care and health insurance industries, LDS Church, the chambers of commerce and just about every sub-group of Utahns except perhaps the state's 2,500 GOP delegates.)

Despite that, the straw polls of GOP legislators in closed caucuses apparently were not even close. If the speaker had chosen to take them to the floor, they would have been over and done with in less than an afternoon. It's highly unlikely a public vote would have a different outcome, but at least we'd know what happened.

The legislators, of course, say secrecy leads to good government, and they want you to trust them on that.

House Majority Leader Jim Dunnagin promises there aren't any binding votes in caucuses, but he's just acknowledging that if they did have binding votes in the caucus, they would be illegal. So instead they have non-binding votes that will become binding later. Or, in the case of Medicaid, they have non-binding votes that kill binding votes later.

And, Medicaid aside, the House is better about keeping their caucuses open than the Senate is.

Senate Majority Leader Ralph Okerlund, R-Monroe, said an overwhelming majority of Republican senators like them closed so they can speak frankly "without grandstanding and folks that are playing games."

There are plenty of private conversations among legislators, and that is entirely appropriate. But when 80 percent of them gather in a room, those conversations are called "legislating."

It's a public process, lawmakers. If you can't do it in front of us, it's cowardice.