In legal filings made public on Monday, Democratic House Speaker Brian Egolf urged the state Supreme Court to uphold emergency legislative procedures that rely heavily on videoconferencing. The Democratic-led Legislature convened on Jan. 19 for a 60-day session.<\/p>\n
The Statehouse is closed to the public and lobbyists, while the House limits participation in floor sessions to the speaker and one additional legislator from each party.<\/p>\n
Egolf says more people are participating in online legislative hearings than could possibly fit physically into committee rooms under normal circumstances.<\/p>\n
Top House Republicans say that the health restrictions exclude people without internet service and are asking the Supreme court to intervene. They also say legislators are being prohibited from in-person participation.<\/p>\n
An unnamed Republican lawmaker tested positive in January for the coronavirus at the Capitol, along with several staff.<\/p>\n
The state Senate has its own pandemic rules that allow legislators to attend floor sessions in-person or remotely from an office in the state Capitol building. House members can participate from home.<\/p>\n
Democratic House Speaker Brian Egolf on Monday described robust online participation in the legislative process by the public as he defends strict precautions against COVID-19 infection at the Statehouse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
legal filings made public on Monday, Democratic House Speaker Brian Egolf urged the state Supreme Court to uphold emergency legislative procedures that rely heavily on videoconferencing. The Democratic-led Legislature convened on Jan. 19 for a 60-day session. The Statehouse is closed to the public and lobbyists, while the House limits participation in floor sessions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[815],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-48713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-associated-press-new-mexico"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48713"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=48713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}