Rep. Jim Lyons, right. Mike Deehan photo.

During last night's 11th-hour debate on a measure to reform the state's public records laws to increase transparency, the House's Democratic majority voted down a motion to increase its own transparency. The vote wasn't a surprise inside the halls of the State House, but it may have ramifications next year if a powerful conservative nonprofit group has anything to say about it.

During the House's debate, one of the chamber's most conservative members dared to suggest the unthinkable: that the Legislature itself should disclose its actions and records in the same way nearly every other state and local body does by being regulated by Massachusetts's public records law.

During a debate on updating the state's open records law, Rep. James Lyons of Andover and other House Republicans moved for a roll-call vote on his amendment to include the House and Senate under the transparency law, which requires that most documents and data generated by government bodies be available to the public.

In Democrats' defense, the vote Wednesday night was actually a procedural one that supported a ruling that Lyon's amendment was out of order — not a direct vote on the merits of whether lawmakers should play by the same rules as the rest of government. But splitting such parliamentary hairs may not mean much to the recipients of campaign mailers claiming their local rep. voted against expanding transparency.

Now the group Mass Fiscal Alliance says they're going to take the vote against Lyon's amendment into consideration when they draw their guns on candidates in 2016.

"Yes, it will be a vote we will use to further educate the public," Paul Craney, the MFA's executive director, told WGBH News in an email after the vote.

The MFA isn't just another namby-pamby nonprofit. (MFA's not a PAC, or political action committee. Yes, they take action, and yes, they are pretty political, but they aren't technically a committee, so the label can't stick.) Their particular goals (lower taxes and state spending, and in this case, government transparency) usually align with the GOP and especially align with the defeat of Democratic candidates for the Legislature. Although the group is an ostensibly nonpartisan registered 501(c)(4), the MFA is responsible for the vast majority of nonpolitical electioneering in the state, and if you look at who they target, the group only goes after Democrats.

Lawmakers have argued that putting the entire Legislature under the open meetings law would prevent the honest negotiations needed to pass bills and make compromise deals.

The state Democratic Party declined to comment on the transparency vote becoming ammunition for the aggressively anti-Democrat MFA.

This post originally stated the Lyon's amendment was to put the Legislature under the open meeting law. The amendment would have put the Legislature under the public records law.