Internet Used To Keep House Of Reps. Broadcasting After Closure

from the don't-stop-us-now dept

If you watch the way Congress acts some of the time, you could easily mistake them for kindergartners at times, with the way they have petty grievances and blow attacks on each other totally out of proportion. Both parties engage in these silly petty spats from time to time, so this is hardly a partisan thing -- though, fans of each party tend to highlight it when the other party acts this way, and ignore it or brush it off when their own party does. Belonging to neither party, and not liking either party, I have no horse in this race, but do find what happened on Friday in the House interesting. For the sake of keeping this from being a partisan post, I'll leave out the party names, though I'm sure in the comments partisans of either side will be sure to make it clear how evil the other one is.

Anyway, one party wanted to discuss some new energy legislation and the other did not. The party that did not, decided to adjourn and shut down the House for summer "vacation" (which is usually more like "go back to my district and campaign to be re-elected" time). Some members of the other party, though, chose to stick around, even though the lights and microphones were turned off and the C-SPAN broadcast was turned off. Not only that, but they continued making speeches about the energy bill and "broadcasting" what was going on using social media tools like Twitter and Qik. Much of this campaign was led by noted early adopter Rep. John Culberson, who has been fighting hard to make such tools acceptable in the House (though, all too often in a highly partisan manner).

Either way, no matter which party you support (or if you support neither), it is cool to see Representatives learning to make use of these tools to better connect with constituents and (sometimes) to route around some of the petty rules used to shut down debate. Now, if we could just figure out a way to get each side to stop playing silly games, while then getting each side to stop automatically blaming the other for shutting off debate (when they would do the exact same thing if roles were reversed), we might actually get somewhere. Unfortunately, I know of no such technology that's likely to do that any time soon.

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Rep. Culberson Finally Admits The Problem Is The Existing House Rules

from the about-time dept

Last week, we were among the first to point out that Rep. John Culberson was wrong in trying to paint a picture of a group of nefarious Democrats trying to block him from posting to Twitter or Qik. The problem wasn't the Democrats -- but existing house rules. We pointed this out both in the blog post and in a direct Twitter to Culberson. He responded to each, but his comments continued to insist that the problem was the new proposal from a few Democrats rather than the existing rules. That made it into something of a partisan fight, with a bunch of political blogs jumping in and supporting "their side."

In a NY Times interview, Culberson still seems to be positioning this as some sort of partisan divide, but buried in the middle an interview with Tim O'Brien (that he apparently did right after the NY Times interview) Culberson finally admits that he was wrong:

"I agree and I never should have brought up Democrat or Republican.... My goal is to shine a light into the Congress and I'll keep partisan labels out of it. And I'm going to stay focused on the goal.... The two things the internet has helped me do is the community has helped me understand to keep the partisan labels out of it, that's good advice which I have taken to heart. And the other good advice I got was that I mean and actually through this debate and TechnoSailor in particular, I think his name's Aaron, had some really good posts on his blog that kind of when you walk through his and a couple of other good blogs out there, I realize that I was targeting the wrong thing, that the existing rules make it illegal for me to post on Twitter, to post on a Qik website, under existing rules I'm operating in the Twilight Zone. So they're correct and it helped me realize my focus need to be that the Congress should treat congressional access to the new social media in the same way that Congress treats our access to the old traditional media."

It's sort of buried in there, but he does admit that he was wrong -- the problem is the existing rules, not the new rules, this isn't a partisan issue and he's already in violation of the existing rules by using Twitter and posting to blogs.

And yet, we still have political bloggers pretending this is a partisan issue. Being neither a Democrat nor a Republican, one of the things I like about most technology issues is that they're non-partisan. It would be nice if they stayed that way so we could focus on the actual issues, rather than flinging mud at political opponents.

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