Editorial by Dana Hess,
South Dakota Searchlight
Editor's note: This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations covered how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.
As the nation celebrates Democracy Day, it’s a good time to be thankful for the freedoms that we have but also be wary of the threats that democracy faces. Those threats aren’t limited to Washington, D.C. They exist in the statehouse and the local courthouse as well.
Democracy is threatened whenever government at any level wants to keep the public in the dark. In July, South Dakota Searchlight reported on one such government official who prefers to stay away from the prying eyes of the public, Department of Corrections Secretary Kellie Wasko. The secretary was speaking to the Legislature’s Government Operations and Audit Committee after two bouts of violence at two different prisons.
According to Wasko, the less said in public about those incidents, the better. At issue was her relationship with the state’s Corrections Commission. The citizen commission is bound by law to weigh in on criminal justice issues as well as sign off on funding requests for prison industries. Commission members complained that they were kept in the dark about the violent incidents at the prisons.
Wasko said she would prefer to answer to lawmakers because Corrections Commission meetings are open to the public. Wasko said she would feel better about talking to legislators if they could “close the door and get into the nitty-gritty.” She actually said “close the door” on what should be public business.
However, If Wasko wants to keep the public in the dark, she’s in the right place: state government. Twice during the 2021 session, legislators brought bills designed to unearth the cost of protecting Gov. Kristi Noem. The much-traveled governor was a rising star in the Republican Party, often accompanied by two Highway Patrol troopers.
Lawmakers, who were under the impression that they held the purse strings for state government, wanted an accounting. The response from the Noem administration: You’re not getting one. There would be no accounting for the governor’s protection detail, lawmakers were told, because anyone who posed a threat could use those figures to determine how well the governor was protected. The administration would not even allow a lump sum to be released. It seems bad guys have an algorithm that could take that figure to deduce how well the governor is protected, whether she’s in Pierpont or Paris.
Majority Republicans, in the same party as the governor and, in 2021, getting along with her better than they have of late, accepted the premise that the budget for protecting Noem needed to be kept secret. That’s because Republican lawmakers have secrecy penciled into their daily schedule during the legislative session.
Each day before the afternoon session, the super majority Republicans in the House and Senate are squirreled away for caucuses that shut out the public. Not only do they meet in secret, away from the prying eyes of the public they serve, they do so in the Capitol, a public building. That means the very people who are being shut out of the meeting get to pay the cost of the heat, lights and furnishings, not to mention the payroll for the people they employ to make their laws. That’s a chore many of us thought they were supposed to do in public.
Occasionally, during legislative sessions, a bill comes along to tweak the state’s weak executive session law. That law is used whenever local governments — city, school, county — want to go into closed session away from public view for various reasons: personnel, student expulsion, attorney consultation, contract negotiation.
While executive session bills appear infrequently, their committee hearings are filled with irony as Republican lawmakers extoll the virtues of openness in government all the while knowing that after lunch they will head into a caucus that slams the door on the public.
Democracy works best when the public is informed.
It’s the role of citizens to show up at the voting booth, at public meetings and at candidate forums to let elected officials know that someone is watching. For their part, officers holders and those charged with running our government have to do so in the light of day. Whenever they close the door on the public, they damage the democratic ideals of this nation.
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence.
