Lauren Ritchie: Sunshine laws are there for a reason.

State Sen. Dennis Baxley wants the Legislature to blast 50 years of open government into oblivion, but the soft-spoken lawmaker who introduces himself as “Dennis” is just so doggone nice about it.

The Ocala Republican, who represents a huge chunk of Lake County, sounds deceptively reasonable when he patiently explains that these “wonderful” Sunshine laws have been abused, especially by opponents of his extreme progun stance, who are “fishing” to “catch you doing something, somehow.”

Public-records requests, sister to the state’s open-meetings requirements, are particularly thorny for him: “It’s just scavenging and harassing, and I don’t appreciate it,” said Baxley, whose district also includes Sumter and part of Marion, adding that he doesn’t mind when someone asks him for information for a “real reason.”

Nobody needs a reason that meets the senator’s standards to see a public record. That’s why they’re called “public” — because the public owns them. But Baxley has other ideas. In February, he sponsored a law that would allow two members of an elected body to discuss public business privately — no inviting the public, no taking minutes. Such meetings are now prohibited.

Under the proposal, each of them could then go meet with another member of their board, and it would all be nice and legal. That would wipe out the foundation of the open government in Florida the average citizen has come to expect — and demand.

Deal-making would be prohibited under Baxley’s proposal. But without minutes or recordings, that’s meaningless.

Baxley’s response boils down to this: Trust me. Hahaha. That guy is such a card. Trust in a governing body pretty much owned by the insurance and development industries?

Trust in a Legislature considered among the top 10 most corrupt in a 2015 Harvard University study?

Public officials for years have wailed that they can’t function under Florida’s open-meeting requirements, which prohibit private discussions of public business between members of the same elected board. That’s because they don’t try.

Check out an average public meeting: Elected officials usually sit on a dais above the public, facing the audience, stiffer than corpses. They go down the row, giving their opinions, almost never glancing at one another and certainly never never wheeling and dealing to get what they want. Government is such a bore.

Elected officials seem to think they have an obligation to keep public meetings as sanitary as childbirth on television — perhaps a whimper or two is emitted and then the infant emerges wrapped in a blanket, all tidy and smiling. Such nonsense. The idea of the groundbreaking 1967 open-meetings law was to bring the debate