THE SPEAKER OF the House is arguably the most powerful person in South Carolina, and if the public should be privy to any decision, it’s the decision to elect a new one.

But the public was shut out earlier this month when members of the House Republican Caucus met to try — unsuccessfully, it turned out — to decide among themselves which of three GOP contenders would succeed departing Speaker David Wilkins.

A similar thing nearly happened a week earlier, when Senate Republicans met to decide whether to keep Hugh Leatherman on as majority leader or to replace him. An Associated Press reporter pressed the issue, arguing that Senate rules make the majority leader a governmental, and not merely a political, official by allowing him to appoint members of conference committees. Unlike his House counterparts, Mr. Leatherman kept the meeting open.

This is no way to run a government — with legislators deciding on a case-by-case basis whether to let the public observe when they conduct the public’s business.

Fortunately, House Republican leaders agreed after the speaker’s race cabal to ask Attorney General Henry McMaster for an official opinion on whether they can lock the public out of their decision-making process.

This should be an easy call.

The state Freedom of Information Act opens with flowery language about how the General Assembly “finds that it is vital in a democratic society that public business be performed in an open and public manner so that citizens shall be advised of the performance of public officials and of the decisions that are reached in public activity and in the formulation of public policy.”

Then it gets to the meaty stuff, declaring that with a few exceptions, “Every meeting of all public bodies shall be open to the public” and defining a meeting as “the convening of a quorum of the constituent membership of a public body, whether corporal or by means of electronic equipment, to discuss or act upon a matter over which the public body has supervision, control, jurisdiction or advisory power.”

Anyone who has ever observed the S.C. House knows that, on many important issues, the House Republican Caucus meeting is where the decisions are made; nothing that happens in the caucus is official until it is repeated on the floor of the House, but it is routine for representatives in caucus to “discuss or act upon a matter over which the public body has ... control.” The Senate Republican Caucus tends to allow its members more freedom to part from the party line on the floor of the Senate, but there’s no question that this quorum of the Senate “discusses” matters over which it has control when it meets behind closed doors.

The open meetings law allows the House and Senate to set their own rules for when they can meet in executive session. But even that giant loophole isn’t enough to allow the secret caucus meetings, because the House or Senate must be officially in session in order to go into executive session.

A ruling from Mr. McMaster might well remind lawmakers that their flowery language praising open government, and their strict rules, apply every bit as much to them as to other state and local officials. But it shouldn’t take that. The law and a sense of concern for the public require the majority party to make its caucus meetings open to the public — and today would be a fine day to begin that practice.