MASSACHUSETTS HOUSE leaders are attempting to chart a path forward on a pair of overlapping transparency fights. In the process, they seem to have set off an even greater conflagration.

House Democrats on Thursday pushed through a bill that would permanently constrain the power voters awarded the state auditor, by ballot measure, to probe the Legislature. It would also make some legislative records — but not lawmakers’ correspondence— publicly available.

They pitched the measure as a constitutionally sound solution and a way to avert a more politically bruising ballot question fight this fall. In a rare speech from the House floor, Speaker Ron Mariano said the bill would “demonstrate to the public what we already know to be true: this is an institution full of hard-working public servants who go above and beyond to ensure that every taxpayer dollar is spent responsibly.”

But the vote drew condemnation from both GOP lawmakers and from legislative skeptics campaigning to wrench open the curtain around Beacon Hill. Rep. Michael Soter, a Bellingham Republican, called the bill “a shield disguised as a window.”

“This is, to me, kind of like a shit sandwich with extra pickles,” House Minority Leader Brad Jones told CommonWealth Beacon.

The fast-moving legislation is far from the final word on either Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s crusade to examine the Legislature or the campaign to subject lawmakers and the governor’s office to the public records law through a ballot initiative this year.

DiZoglio was incandescent with her criticism, posting a 10-minute video to social media in which she contended the bill “essentially negates” the 2024 voter-approved law empowering her legislative audit.

“With this proposed bill, and under the guise of transparency, your state representatives are not only throwing the 72 percent voter-mandated law in the dumpster,” DiZoglio said, referring to margin of support for the ballot law. “They’re taking a match and lighting that dumpster on fire.”

It’s also unclear if the Senate will jump on board with the reforms. Last week, Senate Democrats voted to release some documents to DiZoglio while emphasizing their ongoing right to refuse any future requests she might make — a maneuver that, despite also drawing the auditor’s criticism, is fundamentally different than the House’s push to change the law.

Top senators gave the House’s legislation a muted, occasionally confused reaction.

“I haven’t seen the bill yet. They filed it yesterday. I can’t comment on it without seeing the contents of it,” Senate President Karen Spilka said Wednesday morning, before the House’s vote. “We decided to take one path. We shared it with them. They decided [on] another path, which is fine. We’re different branches, and hopefully we’ll work things out in the future.”

Representatives voted mostly along party lines, 125-28, to approve the bill. All 25 Republicans voted against it, as did three Democrats: Mike Connolly of Cambridge, James Hawkins of Attleboro, and Alan Silvia of Fall River.

The action came one day after top Democrats unveiled it as a partial redraft of an unrelated spending bill, without subjecting its contents to the typical public hearing process before a committee.

Rep. Todd Smola of Warren, the top-ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, said lawmakers on that panel found out about the bill at 10:26 a.m. Tuesday and had until 11 a.m. — just 34 minutes later — to read it and decide how to vote.

“We are so much better than the process that has unfolded,” he said. “For the sake of people asking us for transparency, that is not transparency. That is the opposite of transparency.”

It’s uncommon for House speakers to deliver any remarks during proceedings, but Mariano kicked off the debate Wednesday with a nearly 10-minute speech slamming the “deliberate misinformation, personal attacks, and a media that just can’t get enough of the spectacle” surrounding the issue of legislative transparency.

Both branches adopted new rules at the start of the term intended to ease some common complaints. After that, Mariano said, “other politicians saw the wounds in our body politic and chose to pick at them for their own political benefit.”

“Rather than deciding to deliver documents in a one-off event while continuing to oppose the audit, it has become clear to me that the only way to resolve the endless legal disputes and deliver for voters that a constitutionally viable audit law is to pass comprehensive legislation,” Mariano said.

The House-approved bill has two major components: legislative audits and public records access.

It would amend the auditor’s authority by enshrining in state law a difference between the Legislature’s “administrative functions,” which the auditor could examine, and “constitutional functions,” which any auditor would be barred from probing.

Only four kinds of documents would fall under “administrative functions:” House and Senate budgets, outside audits of the chambers, money spent by the two branches on their own operations, and monetary settlement agreements with current or former legislative employees.

Those are the same categories at the heart of a lawsuit DiZoglio filed in an attempt to force the Legislature’s compliance with her audit. However, while she agreed recently to keep the current legal case focused only on that quartet, the auditor has repeatedly said she intends to request additional documents and look at other areas in the future — something the House bill would essentially render impossible.

The legislation would also prohibit a state auditor from going to court to seek a resolution if he or she feels lawmakers are not complying, a feature that especially bothered Jones.

“We’re acting like a monarchy issuing a decree. It’s incredible to me,” he said. “I believe in their hopes to make a political situation better for themselves, they’re doing nothing but making a political situation worse for themselves.”

Mariano said his team was prompted to act by the Senate’s decision to hand DiZoglio some documents, a step with which he disagreed.

“For reasons that weren’t entirely clear to me, the Senate wanted to go forward with a resolution. I didn’t think the resolution was strong enough. I didn’t want to do a resolution. But when she decided to do her resolution, it left us out by ourselves, so we had to think of how we were going to approach that,” he told reporters Tuesday, referring to Senate President Karen Spilka. “Amongst the leadership team, we decided that this was a good opportunity to work on two issues that were on our docket that involve transparency.”

Democrats in both branches have long argued that a probe by DiZoglio, who previously served in the House and Senate, could infringe on the constitutional separation of powers between branches of government.

However, they have resisted calls to ask the state’s highest court to opine on the topic, like they did earlier this year over a pair of other ballot questions with implications for legislative business.

The other big focus of the bill is access to records, which is the subject of a separate DiZoglio-led ballot question that would subject both the Legislature and the governor’s office to the state’s existing public records law. Most public entities, including local elected officials and employees of the vast state bureaucracy, are already required to comply, but Massachusetts is one of the only states where both the governor and lawmakers are exempt.

Unlike the ballot question, though, the House’s bill would create a new public records framework for the Legislature. Available documents would include committee hearing notices, written testimony, employee training materials, and recorded roll calls. Most correspondence, including lawmakers’ emails, would remain shielded from public view.

“Just because it looks different does not mean we are exempting ourselves from the public records law,” Mariano said during his House speech.

The new system would only apply to the House and Senate. The governor’s office would become subject to the existing public records law under the House’s legislation.

Representatives rolled out their bill Tuesday with support for the records portion from the ACLU of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, and Common Cause Massachusetts, an advocacy group pushing for good government and voter-access reforms.

Geoff Foster, the executive director of Common Cause, said he supports treating lawmakers differently from other elected officials or bureaucrats when it comes to public records. Simply repealing the legislative exemption from the existing public records law, he said, “would introduce many constitutional concerns,” such as subjecting the House and Senate to oversight by the secretary of state’s supervisor of public records.

The bill would instead require the House and Senate to appoint “legislative records access officers” to oversee responses to records requests. Anyone dissatisfied with the officer’s conclusions could appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court.

The existing law, Foster said, is “a uniquely designed, comprehensive law that is really designed for state agencies and offices and municipalities.”

“You can’t put the square peg into the round hole on this,” he said about adding the Legislature to its purview.

It’s not an opinion shared by all transparency advocates. Scotia Hille, executive director of the progressive Act on Mass group, said the bill “would create separate legal standards for legislators to continue avoiding public scrutiny.”

And despite the string of Democratic representatives who followed Mariano by delivering impassioned speeches in support of the bill, the next steps are not much clearer than they were when the week started.

Sen. Cindy Friedman, who has been marshalling her chamber’s response to the audit fight, said Wednesday that she has unanswered questions about the House’s proposal. Asked if the two branches were on different pages when it comes to navigating DiZoglio’s fight, Friedman replied, “Clearly, yes.”

She’s not sure if the divergent approaches will drive a wedge between legislative leaders heading into the busiest two months of the term, when both branches will scramble to shepherd unfinished business through floor votes and into private negotiations before a July 31 deadline.

“What I know is that the auditor is very good at taking anything that anybody does, regardless of the intent behind it, and turning it into something that speaks to how awful the Legislature is,” Friedman told CommonWealth Beacon. “To that extent, I am worried, because it is a distraction and we have so much to do, and but that’s what she does.”