A QUESTION HAS been swirling around some corners of the reform-the-Legislature movement this month: Why did a trio of groups supporting greater transparency, some of whom have previously taken Beacon Hill to task for its closed-door ways, support legislation that crusading state Auditor Diana DiZoglio dubbed a “dumpster fire”?

The answer has to do with the messy sausage-making details of legislation — details that in this case are perhaps not so much a bug as a feature of the bill designed to smooth its passage.

When House leaders announced plans for a controversial measure that would both curtail DiZoglio’s power to audit the Legislature and also subject lawmakers to public records requirements, they included statements of support from the ACLU of Massachusetts, the good-government group Common Cause, and the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association. Those written comments focused only on the records portion of the bill, not the audit sections.

But the statements caught some observers off guard, given that the legislation tied the two issues together, and muddied the debate over a path forward on issues that have roiled state government for years. Rep. Mike Connolly, who wound up voting against the proposal, even picked up the phone to call leaders at the ACLU and Common Cause to ask if they were endorsing the whole bill or just one segment of it.

Meanwhile, one of the leaders of the campaign pushing a ballot question to apply the public records law to the Legislature pointed out that House leaders did not approach her organization about the proposal, despite pitching it as a way to eliminate the need for a statewide vote.

“It was curious to me that those were the organizations whose opinions were solicited on this,” said Scotia Hille, executive director of Act on Mass, about the trio of groups that supported the House bill. “None of them are involved in the campaign.”

While endorsing the House’s public records reforms, the ACLU, Common Cause, and the newspaper publishers’ group are all staying silent on the arguably more controversial portion of the bill curtaining the audit-the-Legislature power voters gave to DiZoglio.

In the weeks following the vote, the ACLU clarified that it neither supports nor opposes anything related to auditing the Legislature. The civil rights group for years has avoided taking a position on DiZoglio’s underlying fight, and it does not have a stance on the provisions in the newly approved House bill that would permanently limit the scope of any legislative audit and bar any auditor from going to court to force Beacon Hill’s compliance.

“We were specifically asked by the House to weigh in on the right way to balance constitutionality, privacy, and transparency for the public records provisions of the bill,” Gavi Wolfe, legislative director for the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “While we have not been engaged on the intragovernmental audit, it has been the subject of constitutional concerns raised by both advocates and scholars regarding separation of powers, and we don’t want the important expansion of the public records law to face similar delays.”

Robert Ambrogi, the executive director of the Mass. Newspaper Publishers Association, similarly said his group did not take a position on the House’s audit reforms.

Still, even if those groups have no position some of the ingredients that went into the legislative sausage, they did not stand in the way of the final product’s passage in the House, nor are they applying much pressure for something to change. None of the three would directly answer a CommonWealth Beacon question about whether they would prefer that the Senate, which must take up the proposal for it to become law, strip out any audit language and advance only a public records reform.

“I would be very surprised to see the ACLU sign off on a bill that removes the ability to petition the courts about a matter of government accountability,” Hille said of the audit portion of the legislation.

Whether voters are aware of the nuances — yes on one part of the legislation, no comment on the other part — depends on how closely they’re paying attention and to whom.

In an opinion piece for CommonWealth Beacon, House Speaker Ron Mariano wrote that his team worked on the audit language based on “separation of powers concerns that have been raised by constitutional scholars,” and worked with the ACLU and Common Cause “to draft the public records portion of the bill.”

Meanwhile, DiZoglio, who is leading both the audit effort and the public records ballot campaign, has fuzzed up the distinction.

In an interview on WCVB after the House vote, DiZoglio complained about language in the bill that would prevent the auditor’s office from filing a lawsuit if the Legislature does not comply with a probe. She name-dropped the ACLU while doing so, describing it as a group that “is supposed to be supporting constitutional rights like accessing the justice system,” implying that it had endorsed that controversial provision or at least ought to oppose it.

“[They] got together without us having any knowledge of it, with no committee hearing, and all came out on the same day and said they had been working together privately on their version of what constitutes an appropriate audit, a transparency bill, and a public records reform bill,” DiZoglio said of how lawmakers rolled out the bill. “We just wish they would have thought it would be nice to consult the rest of us in the state of Massachusetts, the voters of the Commonwealth.”

The blowback revealed the difficult position in which some stakeholders now find themselves: making a good-faith case for why the Legislature should have a different set of public records rules than other officeholders, while straining to avoid the riptide of the toxic audit fight.

Only three House Democrats joined Republicans to vote against the bill: Connolly of Cambridge, James Hawkins of Attleboro, and Alan Silvia of Fall River.

In an interview, Connolly said his opposition was aimed primarily at changes to the voter-approved audit law. He argued that House leaders spent more than a year refusing to petition the state’s highest court for an assessment of whether the auditor’s expanded powers are constitutional, only to push legislation that would cut the judiciary out of the picture going forward as soon as DiZoglio’s lawsuit picked up momentum.

“Now that we finally are at the beginning of an actual legal review of the audit question, it just makes no sense to me to in that moment decide, as the House of Representatives, that we were going to rewrite the audit law and slam the door to the courthouse forever to the auditor,” Connolly said.

DiZoglio continues to push to probe the Legislature more than a year and a half after 72 percent of voters awarded her office that explicit power through a ballot question. After agreeing to keep an initial legal challenge focused only on a small subset of documents, the case is pending in Suffolk Superior Court. (DiZoglio has repeatedly said she intends to probe more than that list and agreed to narrow only the current lawsuit, not her audit in perpetuity.)

The dispute long ago descended into vitriol. In his opinion piece for CommonWealth Beacon, Mariano wrote that the auditor’s “misinformation campaign” has triggered death threats against several lawmakers, including himself. He pointed to some of DiZoglio’s more inflammatory public remarks, such as when she accused Beacon Hill of destroying records and implied that the state judiciary was in the pocket of legislative leaders.

“What’s the result of all this? A debate that is supposed to be about transparency in government and the Constitution now has almost nothing to do with either,” Mariano wrote. “Instead, the entire conversation is covered through the lens of one dramatic feud after another: the auditor against the Legislature, the auditor against the attorney general, the auditor against the courts, and, most recently, the auditor against constitutional scholars and transparency advocates.”

DiZoglio shows no signs of abandoning her scorched-earth approach and tone.

“My word choice describing your public corruption is so much more concerning than the lawbreaking corruption itself,” she wrote on social media in response to Marino’s op-ed. “I’ll be a good girl & remember that my ambitions (gasp) & persistence as a woman really pisses you & your friends off.”

With that fracas still unspooling, DiZoglio and her allies mounted a separate ballot question campaign to subject both the governor’s office and the Legislature to the state’s existing public records law.

The House came up with a different approach: The governor’s office would need to comply with the current system, which also covers plenty of correspondence between officials, while lawmakers would have their own records framework in which many documents, but not their emails or texts, would be publicly available.

Top Democrats and their backers suggested the legislation could obviate the need for a ballot fight, though the decision of whether to take the matter to voters in November would still rest with the campaign that was not involved in crafting the bill.

The campaign pushing the question bristled at the proposal. Most of the records the House would make available are already public, said Hille, the Act on Mass leader, and the bill would funnel initial appeals through a legislative office instead of a separate entity. (Constituents could submit a final appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court if the initial process is unsatisfactory.)

“This would exclude some key categories, particularly legislator correspondence. We see no reason why legislators’ correspondence with lobbyists shouldn’t be a matter of public record,” Hille said.

But for Common Cause, the newspaper publishers’ group, and the ACLU, imposing a different public records standard on the House and Senate represents a sensible way to navigate legitimate constitutional concerns.

Ambrogi, the head of the newspaper group, has for years pushed to make some legislative records public without fully subjecting the Legislature to the existing law that covers virtually all local elected officials and most of the massive executive branch. (Despite that position, the newspaper association only a few months ago filed an amicus brief defending the constitutionality of the ballot question that features far fewer legislative exemptions.)

And Wolfe, the ACLU lawyer, said crafting a separate framework for the House and Senate “respects the separation of powers and protects lawmakers’ private deliberations, as required by our state constitution.”

“Tucking the Legislature into the existing public records law might sound easier, but it would create thorny legal issues about its enforceability, raising the specter of infinitely delayed implementation while litigation plays out,” Wolfe wrote in a blog post. “For instance, that approach would lead to constitutional challenges over the separation of powers, since subjecting the Legislature to existing public records law would require giving the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Attorney General, and judiciary authority over the Legislature’s actions.”

Even some opponents of the bill suggested they are not nearly as frustrated about the records language as they are about the push to change the audit law.

Weeks after the vote, Connolly said he’s still weighing the pros and cons of subjecting the Legislature to its own records framework different from the executive branch and local elected officials. But with what he viewed as the poison pill of the audit changes attached, and a quick 24-hour timeframe for review, he concluded he had no choice but to vote no.

“My concerns with the sudden rewrite of the voter-approved law to enable the legislative audit were so great that I really didn’t get to a full analysis of the public records question,” Connolly said. “Had it simply been a proposal about public records, and we had had a conversation on that, I think there would have been opportunities to go deeper.”