Here are some of the highlights on this week’s agenda. For more complete information, be sure to visit legislature.michigan.gov.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2008
*Senate convenes at 10 am. You can find the day’s official calendar here.
*The Senate will go into recess after the day’s business is completed until 6 pm, when we will reconvene to join the House members for the Governor’s State of the State address.
*The State of the State will begin at 7 p.m. this evening. For broadcast information, check your local listings.
*The Commerce and Tourism Committee will meet this afternoon to consider two bills, including SB 192, a bill by Senator Barcia that would improve job security for returning military personnel.
*The Homeland Security and Emerging Technologies Committee will also meet this afternoon for the confirmation hearing of Kenneth D. Theis' as Director of the Department of Information Technology.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2008
*The Banking and Financial Institutions Committee will meet to discuss numerous bills, including SB 952 (Olshove), SB 951 (Thomas), SB 950 (Clarke), SB 949 (Anderson) and SB 948 (Hunter). These bills are part of a broader bicameral effort to implement the Michigan State Housing Development Authority’s “Save the Dream” Program, which would allow homeowners with adjustable rate mortgages, and those who had missed a payment, to refinance with a fixed-rate loan. For more detailed information on the committee meeting and the bills, click here.
*The Health Policy Committee will meet to hear testimony from several groups on the “Blue Cross” legislation. For scheduling information, click here.

Looking ahead…

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2008
*The Joint House and Senate Appropriations Committees will meet to hear the FY 2009 Executive Budget Recommendations, presented by State Budget Director Bob Emerson. Democratic members of the Senate Appropriations Committee include Senators Switalski (MVC), Anderson, Barcia, Brater, Cherry, Clark-Coleman, and Scott. We will have more information on this meeting next week.

Welcome to “Call of the Senate Democrats,” the first legislative caucus blog in the state of Michigan! Last June we re-launched this website with the intent of giving our constituents better access to state government. Today our hope is that this blog will serve as an interactive forum where members of our caucus can communicate directly with the people of Michigan.

For the uninitiated, a blog is essentially a running log of short 200-400 word diaries, posted in reverse chronological order. Some of the advantages of this format include its immediacy—new diaries can be written and posted in a matter of minutes—and the ability to interact directly with content creators through comments Click here to read our comment policy.

Over the past year our caucus has been working hard to reach out to constituents through new media, including social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube. There are currently only a handful of other legislative caucuses in the country that have a blog—Ohio, Hawaii, Iowa, Alaska—but few that focus exclusively on legislative issues.

Which brings us to the focus of this blog: members of our caucus and staff will be posting several times a week about everything that’s going on in the State Senate. We will cover day-to-day Senate business, committees, bills, resolutions and other key issues affecting state government.

As legislators, we understand how important it is to communicate with the citizens who elected us to serve in Lansing. Active civic participation is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy, and while face-to-face conversations will always be the preferred method of communication for our caucus, we hope that this blog can be an effective new tool to help us interact with the people of Michigan.

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Our new blog carries the title “Call of the Senate Democrats,” and some of our readers might be wondering what this name means.

In a literal sense, it references a “Call of the Senate” in the official Senate Rules, which is a motion that encourages all Senators to be present in the chamber to carry out the people’s business.

And that’s what this blog is all about… Senate Democrats are here in Lansing, ready to serve the people of Michigan and carry out the work of transforming our economy and creating jobs.

The name is also a call to action for Michigan citizens to join us in advancing the Democratic priorities for 2008 and beyond. We want constituents to get involved and support our efforts to invest in education, health care and renewable energy, while protecting vital public services like police and public safety. Following Governor Granholm’s State of the State address, we will be focusing on these initiatives in greater detail throughout the week.