Up until this session, YallPolitics has had an embedded video on its site for both the House and Senate sessions for several years during the session. Haley Barbour and Phil Bryant along with some legislative leaders prioritized making the live video feed available in 2008. Those sessions are pretty cumbersome to watch because they often move so fast that even if you know what you’re looking for, you can miss it. And of course there was no way to go back and rewind. For a couple of years now, I have wanted to archive legislative video debate to be showcased on Y’allPolitics. My sense is that if some legislators from both sides of the aisle had a wide audience of people seeing them make asses of themselves in the well, they’d act differently. I even went so far as to investigate capturing web video streams via DVR. It’s expensive and not very practical.
Thankfully someone had an even better vision than I did.
Mississippi College School of Law, led by Dean Jim Rosenblatt, has really outdone themselves with the Legislative History Project. It features a searchable index for bills where you can see the debate in a web viewer on a per bill basis. it also has a web link to the bill status page so that users can read the actual bill and see the history of it on paper. 2012’s legislative session is already archived and most of the 2013 session is as well. You can bet you’ll be seeing a lot of links to that on YallPolitics in the future and I hope other media outlets will follow suit.
For an example of how beneficial this is, here’s a link to the House debate for Charter schools. All 10 hours of it.
Go investigate the site at http://law.mc.edu/legislature/
