Those of us obsessed with both politics and technology have a juicy new piece of red meat to sink our teeth into this week. Republican Congressman John Culberson of Texas, is leading the charge against a three-week old letter (in pdf) written by Democratic Congressman Mike Capuano of Massachusetts, in which Capuano proposed how members of the House of Representatives be guided in their use of online video. Also in the fight: House Minority Leader John Boehner, who has sounded this alarm over what Capuano, the head of the House Commission on Mailing Standards, has proposed: "I'm writing to alert you to an attack on free speech that is making its way through Congress."
I found that statement from Boehner on Culberson's blog, in a blog post titled "Democrats Seek to Quell Free Speech" -- which should give you a quick sense of some of the political contours of this debate, but more on that in a minute. Rep. Culberson is probably best known to anyone who doesn't live in the Houston area as the Twittering Congressman. Culberson is an active tweeter, posting to his micro-blogging account his first-hand reporting from the steps of the Capitol and his congressional office. He's also an early adopter of Qik technology, which allows streaming video right from a cell phone. It really is rather amazing to have an elected official offering such unmediated access to what happens in the halls of government.
Culberson responded to the Capuano letter by decrying it as an attempt by anti-free speech Democrats to change House rules to nip his Twittering and Qiking in the bud. Them Dems are trying to shut me up, growled Culberson.
But there's a small problem with Culberson's analysis of the situation. I've read the letter on the proposed rules standing up and sitting down. I read it with my glasses on and my glasses off. Ever which way the conclusion is the same: what the Massachusetts' congressman is proposing (though granted, in the gobbledygook that they teach congressional staffers to write in) is a loosening of existing rules. No where does it suggest prohibiting Twitter. No where does it ban Qik. No where does it, as Culberson is claiming, require that disclaimers be posted every time a congressperson wants to type out a thought on the Interweb. What Culberson is raising a hue and cry about is simply not within the four corners of that document.
Now this being DC (and me being an only semi-reconstructed political hack), I can't help but recall who exactly wrote the rules we're debating in the first place? Let's see. Teddy Kennedy was the first member of Congress to have a website, and that was in 1994 -- the year of the Republican Revolution. Republicans controlled the House for the next decade, covering just about all of the time Congress was coming to terms with the Internet.
A wide swath of political geeks have answered Culberson's call. The Sunlight Foundation, a transparency-minded group that has done amazing work innovating in the open government space, quickly got his back. The Congressman first sounded the alarm two days ago, and Sunlight's Let Congress Tweet campaign is already ramped up and getting a good amount of attention. I can't count the number of times my friends, associates, and allies on Twitter have retweeted the movement's call to action.
But let's for a minute hop back to the blog post that Culberson put up to share Boehner's statement, the one titled "Democrats Seek to Quell Free Speech."
If that title looks familiar, it might be because "Democrats Seek to Quell Free Speech" is pretty much how Republicans in Congress have described the things that Democrats do for decades now. When the topic at hand is campaign finance, the Republican line is that reformers are anti-free speech. When it comes to the critically important topic of diversity of voices in the American media, which I've written about for HuffPo in the past, the Republican tactic is to (1) raise the ghost of the Fairness Doctrine and then (2) sound the bell over how Democrats are up to their old speech-shackling tricks again. A similar and familiar trope is branding liberals as language police. 'Dems hate free speech' is one of the most well-worn phrases in the Republican repertoire.
Congress is a slow-moving body that lags a few years behind the greater U.S. But they're catching up. Back when I left the Hill in 2005, getting a member to post on Daily Kos required a day's worth of meetings. Now, in Nancy Pelosi, we have a speaker with a blog that regularly integrates YouTube videos, all manned by a team of online specialists. She's been interviewed by Big Think. She's working with the Digg-ish Ask the Speaker to put together the crowd-sourced questions that she'll be asked at next weeks Netroots Nation (nee Yearly Kos). All perhaps an indication that House Democratic leadership isn't cowering in a corner somewhere in fear of our digital future?
Still, "slow-moving" is the nature of the beast. Congress isn't a start-up. It's meant to mostly keep the status-quo going, with slow and methodical adjustments that keep the country moving in the right direction. Everyone agrees that when it comes to the Internet, the House has work to do. And that's what Capuano and others have been attempting to do, in Congress's own plodding way.