By Jay C. Grelen, Maumelle Monitor[ed], Storyteller in Chief
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders opened the Arkansas Legislature’s 2024 Fiscal Session on Wednesday with her first State of the State speech. By tradition, the Arkansas Senate joins the state Representatives in a joint session for the annual speech.
Governor Sanders’s entourage included her husband, their children, her Arkansas State Police security detail, and a host of aides. Her parents, former Governor Mike Huckabee and Janet Huckabee, were among the guests seated at the front of the House chamber. Governor Huckabee’s sister, and at least one of the Huckabees’ sons, observed Arkansas’s 47th governor from the east balcony.
All the other newspaper and television folk were set up inside the House of Representatives, so Maumelle Monitor[ed] was the only outfit to record the governor’s ascent of the marble stairs from the second floor of the state Capitol to the House on the third floor.
The video is three parts:
I. The Ascent. At thirty-five minutes past noon, Governor Sanders and her husband, Bryan, take to the center of the stairs. At the top, they disappear to the right and enter the House of Representatives’ suite of offices.
II. The Grand Entrance. Governor Sanders reappears. She’s the one in the off-white dress in the middle of the crowd. At about the one-minute, thirteen-second point on the video, applause erupts in the chamber as Governor Sanders enters. Then members of the House staff close the elegant wooden doors on the ceremony.
III. The Descent. The Governor and her children hew to the right of the stairs on their return to the Governor’s Office in Suite 250.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported on the speech.
The Democrat-Gazette’s Mike Wickline, dean of the Capitol reporters, also covered the speech.
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