The New Mexico Senate celebrated Sunshine Week by – what? – cloaking lawmakers’ emails in secrecy.

Nice going, folks. You’ve just made a mockery of the transparency many of you say you favor.

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Sunshine Week, which concludes today, is meant to call attention to the need for government openness. The government conducts the public’s business and thus, the public has a right to know what’s being done in its name. New Mexico legislators, though, flouted that need by agreeing to keep emails from public view.

The New Mexico Senate bill stipulates that communications are public only when the body meets. Legislators’ private emails and other communications can be kept from the public, even when they’re delivered on public time, using public equipment. The state’s attorney general disagrees with the Legislature’s decision to conceal public records. Gov. Susana Martinez must sign the legislation for it to allow a special exemption under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act. It’s unlikely she’ll go along.

Still, for a body of state legislators to approve such an abomination on the very week intended to avoid this kind of chicanery is an insult to the people who pay the Legislature’s freight.

That would be the public, for whom lawmakers’ work – not the other way around.