The US Supreme Court refuses to hear a challenge to Texas' Open Meetings Act

Politico calls this a win for transparency advocates in the state.

The denial of certiorari leaves intact a ruling from a federal appeals court, which upheld the law against a challenge from local government officials, who claimed it restricted their First Amendment rights.

The Texas Open Meetings Act prohibits officials of certain governing bodies from “knowingly participating in a closed meeting, to organize a closed meeting, or to close a meeting to the public,” according to the Fifth Circuit Court opinion.

In 2005, two Alpine, Texas, city council officials were indicted for violating the Texas Open Meetings Act over emails they exchanged, which the government argued constituted a closed meeting. Though charges were later dropped, some of the officials involved in the email exchange sued, saying the act was a restriction of free speech, overbroad and vague.

The district court and circuit court both upheld the statute, rejecting the plaintiff’s claims.

The three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit held that not only is the law content-neutral and constitutional, it also serves an important purpose for open government.

“Here, government is not made less transparent because of the messages of private speech about public policy: Transparency is furthered by allowing the public to have access to government decisionmaking. This is true whether those decisions are made by cogent empirical arguments or coin-flips. The private speech itself makes the government less transparent regardless of its message,” opinion from Judge Jerry Smith stated.

Attorney General Greg Abbott, who defended the act, issued a statement praising the Supreme Court’s move to let the lower court ruling stand as a win for open government.