There’s great news from the legislature today—the House Republican Caucus has OKd the broadcast of video and audio from floor sessions. Better still, the General Assembly’s tech staff is going to have the infrastructure up and running in time for this session, providing both audio and video. They’ve got the capacity to serve video to 750 viewers simultaneously, with the ability to expand that if demand warrants. This is great news for open government. And great news for me. Posting all of last year’s session to Google Video was a huge pain in the ass, though it may have been necessary to show the house that if they weren’t going to provide video, the private sector would, and on its own terms.
Combined with house Republicans’ recent decision to end their practice of holding secret votes, we can see that the chamber’s majority party is finally realizing that they’re going down in flames. They should have seen this coming two years ago, like the rest of us did, but it appears that they’ve figured it out at last.