Seldom challenged under either Democrat or Republican regimes, the General Assembly's closed caucuses suddenly are under fire.

Few dispute the right of legislators to go behind closed doors to discuss intra-party housekeeping matters. But in recent years the daily, in-session caucuses  especially those of Republicans who constitute the majority party in the House  have taken on all the trappings of a decision-making public body.

Rooms in the Capitol get commandeered, meetings are formally announced in the daily Calendar, controversial public issues get discussed, caucus positions get hammered out, and  at least among House Republicans  dissenters apparently get a free pass only when conscience or home-town politics dictate.

Because the legislators write and interpret their own rules, leaders claimed the caucuses were not subject to the Freedom of Information Act  in effect, telling challengers to "sue us."

Nobody's wanted to go the lawsuit route, figuring it was no-win; even if the state's Supreme Court  elected by legislators  were to order the doors open, pro-closure legislators might quickly amend rules or introduce bills to close them with an explicit FOIA exception.

At least that was the assumption, until recently.

But that was before ex-state GOP chairman Ed Matricardi argued in court (to no avail) that it was perfectly OK for him to eavesdrop on Gov. Warner's conference calls with Democratic legislators. His premise: such calls were party caucuses, no FOIA exemption exists for caucuses, hence it was perfectly legal (forget ethics or U.S. wiretapping laws) for somebody to attend the Democrats' conference-call meetings.

To add to the confusion, House Republicans held closed meetings to seal the fate of then-Speaker Vance Wilkins  some in the form of closed caucuses, some with public votes to go into closed session for personnel matters (as FOIA permits).

If the caucuses weren't public meetings, then why was FOIA invoked? To that question, no one had a good answer.

Not surprisingly, the Virginia Capitol Correspondents Association stepped up the pressure in the 2003 legislative session, formally asking that caucuses be opened when not dealing with FOIA-exempt topics.

House Democrats seized on the issue  presumably to embarrass the Republicans  and voted to open their caucuses. Budget conferees from both parties in the House also opened up their deliberations. Most senators balked, but not all.

In early summer things got even more bizarre. Gov. Warner announced that the legislature's Tax Commission planned a private meeting with him, and that he'd gone along to try to make talk of a tax overhaul more politically palatable.

No matter how the definitions got stretched for permissible closed meetings (and members came up with a novel suggestion that since the Tax Commission hadn't yet formally organized, it wasn't a public body!), no loophole was big enough to take the tax issues into secret talks.

House Speaker Bill Howell and Attorney General Jerry Kilgore both called for an open meeting; the Tax Commission's Republicans quickly agreed.

All this was obviously too much for Del. Chip Woodrum (D-Roanoke), a FOIA authority who'll retire from the Assembly in January, and not, it's now clear, one day sooner.

Noting that Howell had called for an open meeting of the tax talks, Woodrum challenged him to support a rule change to open his party's daily partisan strategy briefings when the legislature's in session.

As for Kilgore, he got a formal request from Woodrum for a legal opinion as to whether a legislative caucus is a public body subject to FOIA's notice and access requirements for public meetings.

Kilgore believes caucuses should be open but his legal interpretation of FOIA, not his personal beliefs, will dictate the official opinion, a spokeswoman said.