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C-SPAN TO CONGRESS: LET US IN! When President Barack Obama was campaigning for the job in 2008, ?

By Glenn Reynolds

C-SPAN TO CONGRESS: LET US IN!

When President Barack Obama was campaigning for the job in 2008, he vowed that he would bring greater transparency to government?especially when it comes to health care reform legislation:

We’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.

Now C-SPAN is asking precisely for that. Its CEO, Brain Lamb, has sent a letter to House and Senate leaders, requesting that his network be permitted to broadcast the final negotiations, as the two chambers work out the differences between each body’s version of the legislation:

As your respective chambers work to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate health care bills, C-SPAN requests that you open all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings, to electronic media coverage.

The C-SPAN networks will commit the necessary resources to covering all of these sessions LIVE and in their entirety. We will also, as we willingly do each day, provide C-SPAN?s multi-camera coverage to any interested member of the Capitol Hill broadcast pool.

The proceedings of conference committees?the House-Senate gatherings that merge and finesse different bills into a final measure?usually occur behind closed doors. And The New Republic has reported that the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate have decided in this case to skip a conference committee and hold informal negotiations instead, in order to avoid legislative procedures that Senate Republicans could use to stall the deliberations. That would make the process even more secretive.

Read the whole thing.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on January 05, 2010 (boomark / email).