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, judges Janet Sutton and Mark Pfeiffer allowed the Missouri House to keep secret information about who is sending its members emails to influence public policy.

The ruling was badly timed. Starting Sunday, the nation celebrates , dedicated to shining a light on government transparency laws and the importance of citizens keeping an eye on elected officials.

That’s what Clayton attorney Mark Pedroli was doing back in April 2019, when he emailed certain House members, asking for correspondence from them. Several lawmakers responded to his requests, but they redacted the names and addresses of the constituents who emailed them. The House had passed a rule that allowed them to do so.

Pedroli sued and argued that the rule was unconstitutional. That’s because Missouri voters in 2018 had amended the state constitution to make clear that lawmakers are subject to the Sunshine Law.

None of that matters, two of the appeals court judges ruled, using technical reasons and questionable logic to decide Pedroli didn’t have standing to bring the lawsuit. It was as if the court was doing everything in its power to avoid enforcing the constitution.

“Horrible majority opinion,” attorney David Roland wrote on the social media site X.

Roland, like Pedroli, has successfully fought for citizens to have access to government meetings and records. Roland noted that the dissent in the case, written by appeals court Judge Alok Ahuja, says Pedroli, like any other citizen of the state, does have standing to sue for Sunshine Law violations, and that the underlying House rule is clearly a violation of the constitution.

Pedroli will appeal, and perhaps the Missouri Supreme Court will intervene.

In the meantime, it’s helpful to understand why this lawsuit and its result is so important.

In 2018, several lawmakers received emails that supposedly came from constituents lobbying to make it harder for out-of-state residents to file civil class-action lawsuits in Missouri. The letters referenced a large verdict in one of the Johnson & Johnson talc powder cases.

The letters appeared to be copied verbatim from a petition posted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on a website called . The site pitches itself as a source of “grassroots” activism for conservative causes.

But as I reported at the time, many of the letters didn’t come from the people whose names were on them. Somewhere along the line, letters were generated by somebody lobbying for the legislation, and real Missourians were caught in the middle. Some letters came from vacant addresses; others came from people who said they didn’t send them. Some names and addresses couldn’t be verified.

“These are fake emails driven by out-of-state defendants desperate to avoid responsibility for cancers and deaths that jurors in Missouri and elsewhere have found they caused — after weighing the actual evidence,” state Rep. Jay Barnes, a Republican from Jefferson City, told me at the time.

The House rule that allowed lawmakers to redact constituent names and addresses was passed in part as a result of my reporting. It wasn’t meant to protect Missouri citizens, but instead protect big donors who are often behind such fake grassroots campaigns.

After my columns on the topic ran, and the rule was passed, Pedroli got involved on behalf of the Sunshine and Government Accountability Project, an unincorporated organization he created to protect access to records.

If the appeals court decision tossing his lawsuit stands, citizens will lose. Secrecy will reign. Bad actors will be allowed to manipulate the levers of government with no accountability.

“I would hold that the House was not entitled to rely on House Rule 127 to withhold constituent records from Pedroli,” Ahuja wrote in his dissent, which took his fellow judges to task for trying to find “hyper-technical” reasons to avoid ruling on the case’s merits. “The House Rule cannot exempt records from disclosure, where those records are otherwise subject to disclosure under Missouri’s generally applicable public-access laws.”

Five Sunshine Weeks have come and gone since Missouri voters added transparency provisions for lawmakers into the state constitution. As a sixth one begins, it seems a good time for the Missouri Supreme Court to take up Ahuja’s call to lift the dark cloud hanging over the Missouri Capitol.