Sunshine is a disinfectant
So, let me see if I have this correct: Knox County Commission flagrantly, obscenely, and blatantly violates the Open Meetings Law, thumbing their collective noses at the people who elected them. They get smacked down by a jury for doing so, and the judge threatens them with criminal contempt for future violations. A state legislative committee then suggests weakening the Open Meetings Law as a result.
As it currently stands, Tennessee's sunshine law is unambiguous and easy for even the idiots who comprise most of Knox County Commission to understand: no deliberations of public business may be conducted by two or more members of the same body in secret. That's not hard to decipher.
The proposal by the state legislature's committee to increase this number from two to four will gut the sunshine law and will strip it of any enforceable effect (Michael Silence has been covering the reaction to this toxic proposal; see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Hypothetically, let's say there's a certain county commission divided roughly into two camps: one camp is loyal to a certain politician (say, the county mayor), and the other camp is loyal to a certain former office-holder (say, the former sheriff). Each camp is headed by one specific commissioner. The sunshine law prevents the heads of those two camps from meeting in secret to hammer out an agreement between them and thus garnering a majority of the commission by virtue of their leadership positions. By increasing the forbidden number of members meeting in secret to four (as the committee has proposed), the spirit and intent of the sunshine law will be rendered meaningless.
Sunshine has a fatal effect on vampires; I guess it's no surprise the blood-suckers in our county government want to shield themselves from it.