Attorney General Coleman: Anti-DEI bill passage valid despite open meetings concerns
Kentucky’s attorney general found that Republican lawmakers did not substantively violate open meetings laws last month when moving an anti-diversity, equity and inclusion bill through a legislative committee.
After a contentious March 4 meeting of the House Standing Committee on Postsecondary Education, Republicans voted to advance House Bill 4, one of the GOP’s priority bills of the 2025 legislative session to dismantle DEI initiatives at public colleges and universities, which is now law.
Minutes after the meeting was adjourned and after most committee members had left the room, the committee chairman, Rep. James Tipton, R-Taylorsville, called for a vote to amend the bill’s title. It happened to be caught on video by the Kentucky Lantern.
University of Louisville graduate student James Orlick, who spoke against the bill that day, filed two complaints alleging lawmakers violated transparency laws — one with House and committee leadership on March 11, and another with Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman’s office March 25.
Coleman responded with an opinion April 8.
House and committee leadership did not respond to the complaint within three business days — a violation of Kentucky’s Open Meetings Act, Coleman’s office said. However, they did not substantively violate the open meetings law in their passage of House Bill 4, Coleman wrote in the opinion.
The crux of Orlick’s complaint was that Tipton quickly reconvened the committee to include the amendment vote shortly after it adjourned, a practice frowned upon in previous open meetings decisions published by the AG’s office.
Coleman stated that those previous open meetings decisions relied too heavily on widely cited texts governing meetings procedure like Robert’s Rules of Order and Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedure. Those previous decisions were cited in Orlick’s complaint.
“The Appellant relies on these decisions for the principle that, once adjourned, a public agency may not immediately reconvene without following the procedures to convene a new meeting. However, these outside sources cannot be superimposed onto the Act. To the contrary, the Office also has routinely held that the Act does not require public agencies to follow any particular rules of parliamentary procedure, such as Robert’s Rules of Order, to conduct its meetings,” Coleman wrote.
Further, Coleman said his office “lacks jurisdiction to determine whether the committee followed its own legislative procedures.”
This is a notable pivot from the precedent set by previous attorneys general, who have historically “reviewed the actions of the General Assembly in conducting its meetings under the open meetings law,” said Amye Bensenhaver. She is co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition and former assistant attorney general.
She said Coleman’s reluctance to weigh in directly here begs the question: “Where does the open meetings law end and legislative procedure begin?”
“If you’re going to back away from the substance of the dispute — whether post-adjournment action is permissible, and (according to statute) it is not — then you’ve got a slippery slope,” Bensenhaver said. “Entrusting (lawmakers) to be arbiters of their own open meetings conduct is a dangerous proposition.”
Coleman also stated in his opinion that even if the House Postsecondary Education Committee did violate the open meetings law in the way Orlick alleged, it wouldn’t matter because the final title was added in a Senate floor amendment.
“Even if House Committee Amendment 1 were to be voided due to a violation of the Act by the Committee, it would have no effect on the final passage of HB 4,” Coleman wrote.
Orlick told the Herald-Leader that he’s “looking into” taking the legislature to court over the issue, but did not say definitively one way or the other.
The complaint
After Tipton audibly adjourned the meeting on March 4, some members of the audience began shouting to lawmakers their frustrations over the bill. One woman had to be escorted out by security, the video shows.
“As attendees were removed by security staff and the State Police, (Tipton) could be heard asking, ‘How many members do we have here?’” Orlick’s March 11 complaint says. “And seconds later, ‘We need to do a title amendment. We need to do a motion on the title amendment.’”
An impromptu motion on a title amendment was then made and a vote on the title amendment quickly taken, with some members of the committee already gone from the room.
Orlick alleged Tipton violated the Open Meeting’s Law for voting on a measure after a meeting was clearly adjourned — re-adjourning the meeting would’ve required proper notice to the public — because a quorum was not present.
While seemingly inconsequential, it’s still a “constitutionally mandated step in the process of statutory enactment,” Orlick wrote in his March 11 complaint.
But Coleman does not view this vote as a violation of the law.
“This office has routinely held that the (law) does not require public agencies to follow any particular rules of parliamentary procedure ... to conduct its meetings,” he said in his April 8 decision, adding that he was declining to “make non-textual distinctions between recesses and adjournments.”
Coleman added: “In this appeal, the Appellant asks the Office to determine whether the committee may reconvene a meeting—immediately after the chairman announced the meeting was adjourned—to complete the Committee’s business it inadvertently had not finished. Thus, in effect, the Appellant asks the Office to determine the legality of the procedures used by a standing committee of the General Assembly. This the Office cannot do.”
House GOP leadership spokesperson Laura Leigh Goins wrote in a statement Wednesday that, though the committee initially erred, it attempted to “fix the oversight,” only later realizing those actions “did not comply with its rules.”
The title amendment was later adopted by both chambers, “ensuring it was done in compliance with the legislative rules and Open Meetings Act,” Goins said.
“Ultimately, as the opinion recognizes, the issue was identified early by lawmakers and staff and addressed immediately with appropriate remedy.”
She added that House Speaker David Osborne’s office is “taking additional steps” to ensure all members, particularly committee chairs and vice chairs, avoid those situations going forward.
But echoing Bensenhaver, Orlick told the Herald-Leader Tuesday that Coleman’s decision reveals “threats to democracy.”
He added: “Now it is clear in Kentucky (that) the Kentucky Legislature will not follow the Open Meetings laws, they will violate the law, and the Republican AG will not weigh-in.”
