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.