THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL were inseparable when lawmakers buckled in for the first round of their review of nearly a dozen ballot questions and found themselves, once again, butting heads with a former colleague who has emerged as the Legislature’s chief antagonist.

Auditor Diana DiZoglio, a one-time Democratic state rep and senator who is leading the campaign seeking voter approval for extending the public records law to the Legislature and the governor’s office, showed up to a hearing about the measure ready to rumble, and lawmakers responded in kind, expressing exasperation with her take-no-prisoners approach but at times throwing their own punches during the testy, two-hour hearing.

“Knowledge is power, and when we as elected officials believe that knowledge belongs only to a select few and not to everybody, what does that say? It says we believe that we should just have all the power,” DiZoglio said in making her case for the ballot question.

Lawmakers give little indication they’re interested in subjecting their operations to the public records law, while DiZoglio and her allies were eager to paint the hesitation as yet another instance of legislative opacity — the same overarching topic that propelled her successful 2024 ballot question about auditing the House and Senate.

Massachusetts is widely regarded as having some of the weakest laws granting public access to government workings. Transparency advocates say it’s the only state in the nation where the legislature, governor’s office, and judiciary are all exempt from records requests.

Despite the big carveouts at the top, almost all other elected officials in Massachusetts — including the auditor — and the vast majority of the state’s massive executive branch already need to comply with the public records law.

Lawmakers on Tuesday signaled they think they should remain in a different category, arguing that pushing their communications and documents into the open air could violate constituents’ privacy and expose legislators to misrepresentations of their work.

“The Legislature is a deliberative body. It is our job to think of things, to have many discussions, to talk over what our differences are,” Sen. Cindy Friedman, co-chair of the special committee reviewing the full field of ballot questions, told reporters after the hearing. “If every one of those is public, if everything we do is public, we will not be able to do our work because someone will take something out of that and turn it into a completely different message, and that’s what we will end up responding to.”

“I need to be able to talk to my folks, my other senators, and be able to have a real and honest conversation,” she added. “We are not hiding anything. We are not trying to go and do nefarious, nasty, bad things. We are not spending huge amounts of money on yachts, right? None of that.”

That trepidation has been mutated and amplified by the intraparty mutual disdain between DiZoglio and House and Senate Democrats, who spent much of Tuesday’s hearing trading accusations of operating in bad faith.

The ballot question campaign, which was originally launched by transparency activists with the Coalition for Healthy Democracy before DiZoglio took charge of it, would require both the Legislature and the governor to comply with public records requests.

Under existing law, most divisions of state and local government must release most correspondence, reports, and other documents produced during the course of their work when asked, with some exceptions designed to protect privacy or prevent release of sensitive material.

But lawmakers wrote themselves out of the law, and the governor’s office for years has claimed to be exempt from the obligations that the rest of the executive branch faces, citing a 1997 Supreme Judicial Court decision. Courts, too, do not consider themselves covered by the law’s requirements.

Transparency advocates have said Massachusetts and Michigan are the only two states where the governor’s office does not need to comply with public records laws, and that Massachusetts is alone in the nation in having a governor’s office, a Legislature, and a court system that are all exempt.

Scotia Hille, executive director of the progressive group Act on Mass, recalled speaking with a journalist who had moved from Florida, which has a famously robust public records law, to Massachusetts and mused that information was much harder to obtain here.

“With all due respect, I don’t think that we should settle for making Florida look good,” Hille said during the hearing.

Gov. Maura Healey pledged before taking office that she would reverse precedent and fulfill records requests. Since then, her record is mixed: her team has withheld many records from the press and public, while releasing some such as past monthly calendars.

Healey said in December that she would support the ballot question “provided that there are certain exemptions.”

Jesse Littlewood of the Coalition for Healthy Democracy pitched the ballot question as a modest proposal that would apply the law to a larger share of state government.

“This proposal is not sweeping or radical. It does not invent a new system. It simply extends an existing system,” Littlewood told the panel, touting “careful and explicit carveouts” in the ballot question intended to protect lawmakers’ communications with constituents and internal deliberations.

Many members of the committee seemed unconvinced about those protections, however.

Republican Rep. David Vieira of Falmouth, who has supported DiZoglio’s attempts to audit the Legislature, grilled proponents on how exactly existing law or the proposed update would protect communications with entities like nonprofit organizations, who might not reach out in the same way as an individual constituent.

Sen. Paul Feeney, a Foxborough Democrat, argued that “if this is done incorrectly,” an individual reaching out to his or her state lawmaker to urge action on a bill might become public information.

“This would be a corporate lobbyist’s dream, to be able to get access to see who’s reaching out to us as legislators [and] the way that we’re making decisions,” he said.

The only testimony lawmakers heard Tuesday opposed to the ballot question came from Jerold Duquette, a professor at Central Connecticut State University and co-founder of the Massachusetts Law and Politics Project, who contended that the measure represents an “unconstitutional” infringement upon the separation of powers.

Just as the 2024 ballot law empowered the auditor’s office to require “involuntary cooperation” from lawmakers, Duquette argued, expanding access to public records could force the House and Senate’s “involuntary cooperation” with the secretary of state, the elected official who enforces the law.

It took only a single question into DiZoglio’s appearance for the hearing to devolve.

After proponents finished their presentation, Sen. Barry Finegold kicked off the Q&A portion by noting that lawmakers are weighing action to offset federal higher education funding cuts.

Could their discussions with colleges and universities, he asked, be acquired by the Trump administration using a public records request if the question were to pass?

For DiZoglio, the line of inquiry was beyond the pale.

“I find it disgraceful that you’re trying to tie public records reform to the Trump administration right now, and I think that you should be ashamed of yourself,” she told Finegold. (Later on, after an extended clash, DiZoglio offered a more substantive response: Pretty much every state agency outside the governor’s office, she said, is already subject to the public records law, including those that deal with federal funding or other politically sensitive issues.)

DiZoglio is not shy about linking the records reform to her 2024 audit-the-Legislature ballot question, which won support from 72 percent of voters but remains stalled in the face of opposition from legislative leaders and a sustained feud between the auditor and attorney general.

She mentioned the audit effort several times during Tuesday’s hearing, and at one point warned lawmakers that their opposition to the public records measure could fuel further discontent from voters who have already noticed a lack of movement on something they authorized two years ago.

After her appearance, she told reporters combining the two topics is a deliberate strategy.

“I think it actually makes it much more salient to people,” she said. “I will talk to a lot of folks who might not know what the public records laws are, but they do know what the audit is. They do know that they voted for an audit and that it’s not getting done.”

In February, DiZoglio sued legislative leaders for stonewalling her probe, circumventing Attorney General Andrea Campbell, who has declined to allow any legal action between the factions to advance.

SJC Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt on Tuesday denied DiZoglio’s motion for a special assistant attorney general to represent her office, writing that the auditor “cites no statute, constitutional provision, or other authority that would permit a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court to appoint a [special assistant attorney general].”

Tuesday was the first in the committee’s series of hearings over the next month diving into the 11 ballot questions pending before the Legislature. Another measure seeking to repeal a 2024 gun control law is already on the ballot, so voters could decide as many as 12, a record for a single year.

While lawmakers will hear hours of testimony, their options are limited. The Legislature can either approve a question as drafted or take no action, after which proponents would gather a final round of signatures to lock in a spot on the ballot.

“We can’t change it, we can’t engage with other stakeholders and fix it so it’s more nuanced or it addresses issues that other people have,” Friedman said.

A similar panel, also chaired by Friedman and Rep. Alice Peisch, two years ago recommended no action on any of the questions before them. This time, their work will unfold amid growing legislative frustration over the surge in lawmaking-by-popular-vote.

Legislative leaders at times have brokered negotiations in which they enact a compromise version of a ballot question proposal and campaigns agree to suspend their efforts. It’s unclear at this point whether lawmakers will be interested in seeking agreement with any proponents to head off a ballot question.