Democrat Michael Capuano Tries to Stop Members of Congress from Using the Internet

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In an example of an early failure to foresee how the Internet would change everyday communication, the rules restricted members from sending e-mails to their family and friends, and from using the Internet to access Web sites that may be considered outside the realm of "official" business. As one House aide later complained, "Some Members say you should be able to e-mail your son, but you can’t send franked mail to your son."
- The Open House Project Final Report

For Personal Democracy Forum’s Rebooting America, I wrote about something called an Obviousmeter:

The Obviousmeter compares cultural trends and existing power centers and asks, "Can a sixteen year old do something our government can’t?" If the answer in any particular area is yes, then that’s a place to find out where the future is going to smack us in the ass.

I used the example of members being unable to post Youtube videos on their official web sites as a clear example of how Congress is unprepared for the future. As it so happens, the controversy over member restrictions on web use is now heating up.

The Sunlight Foundation (for which I consult) has started an advocacy campaign called Let Our Congress Tweet to let members of Congress use twitter to communicate with their constituents. Right now, Congresspeople have to clear all internet communications with the Franking Commission, a body that censors speech to make sure it’s not ’political’ in nature. In the 1970s, members used their ’franking’ powers, which is just a complicated way of saying that members are allowed to mail their constituents for free, to advocate for their reelection and solicit political funds. This is now illegal, and rightfully so. It’s not fair that members get to mail their constituents on the government’s dime for their own reelection, since that helps incumbents at the expense of challengers. They do it anyway, on both sides, like Dave Reichert and Leonard Boswell, who send out huge glossy brochures to their constituents during election season. But they shouldn’t, because it’s illegal and an abuse of power.

What does this have to do with Twitter? And who really cares about Twitter? Good questions, which I’ll answer.
When the internet emerged in the 1990s, the powers that be looked at email and said ’it has the word mail in it so the Franking Commission gets to censor it’. It’s very similar to looking at blogs, seeing a screen, and saying ’well it’s just like TV or mainstream media’. Dumb but easy. And they have applied this restriction to all subsequent uses of the internet from official government resources. Every email newsletter, every alert, every Congressional website, etc, has to go through a bureaucratic group of middle managers. I’ve met with them, and frankly, the Republicans on the commission are savvy and flexible, and the Democrats are stupid and see this job as a sinecure where they keep the people out of the People’s House.

Transparency is one of the few places where there really is a bipartisan alliance. Newt Gingrich created Thomas, the web resources for legislation, and the Republicans do have a history of advocating for open government and new models of communication, including C-Span, direct mail, and web communication. Some progressive Democrats do as well, but the old school top-down Democrats elected under the good government influences of the 1970s tend towards restricting political participation.

And so members can’t Tweet without going through the Franking Commission, and can’t put up youtube clips on their official websites because it’s considered a corporate endorsement of Youtube/Google. To be a little bit broader about it, while in the 1970s members could communicate with their constituents using mail for free, and constituents couldn’t talk back because of capital restrictions, now the equation is reversed. Constituents can email, twitter, blog, and youtube and their members can’t. The most powerful deliberative democratic body in the country - Congress - can’t take advantage of the greatest set of deliberative democratic set of tools ever developed.

That is really really dumb. I’ve been working with the Sunlight Foundation for two years on this problem, which we identified early on in our final report. But this is just a peak under the tent of a huge set of legal and political issues having to do with a radical shift in the communications environment. For instance, when all data can move over any wire, it makes no sense to regulate cable TV and telephone wires as if they serve different purposes, as Google lobbyist Rick Whitt argues in his seminal work on modern communications policy. When email is costless, it makes no sense to regulate it as if it is mail. When the cost of political participation drops to near zero, it makes more sense for the government to encourage more participation than try to restrict the participation of labor and corporations. In other words, it’s time to reject the entire framework of the 1970s good government groups and their approach to campaign finance reform. These groups are wrong, they always have been wrong, and instances like members of Congress being unable to tweet or use video on their official websites are only the most obvious places where their stupidity and elitism shows itself.

So that’s the backstory. Speaker Pelosi has been a strong ally of transparency and openness, but not all Democrats are like that. Michael Capuano, the Chair of the Congressional Committee on Mailing Standards, sent a letter to Bob Brady, the head of the House administration committee. Here’s what he said.

"The ONLY item we seek to address is LOOSENING existing rules to allow members to post videos as a first step toward making the rules meet our constituents’ expectations regarding how they communicate with us in the 21st century," Capuano said. "This was completely ignored during the years that Republicans controlled Congress while the Internet grew exponentially. It is currently against House rules to post video on any site with commercial or political advertising or to use taxpayer-funded resources to post outside of the House.gov domain."
"Apparently the Republicans spreading these lies would rather operate without rules and open the House to commercialism. Maybe they don’t care if an official video appears next to a political advertisement for Barack Obama or John McCain, creating the appearance of an endorsement. And I guess they don’t care if constituents clicking on their videos will be treated to commercials for anything you can imagine, from the latest Hollywood blockbuster to Viagra.

As Kevin Marks said on the Open House listserv, "I trust he’ll stop giving interviews to Newspapers too, or require that the drop all advertisements from issues in which his comments appear". Speaker Pelosi weighed in on the matter:

We share the goal of modernizing the antiquated franking regulations to address the rapidly changing realities of communications in the internet age. Like many other Members, I have a blog, use YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, and other new media to communicate with constituents, and I believe they are vital tools toward increasing transparency and accountability.

So Pelosi is good on this stuff, as she should be. She has an exceptionally talented New Media staff who can do great work because there are no Franking Restrictions on leadership offices. The right is largely correct on the substance of their claims, though they are making some partisan accusations that aren’t grounded in a real understanding the problem. Soren Dayton at the Next Right asserts that Pelosi is violating the rules through her use of social media, because he didn’t know that leadership offices aren’t subjected to the rules. What is actually going on is that Pelosi’s excellent use of blogging, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Digg is unwittingly providing an extremely successful pilot for how members and committees can and should use the web to interact.

Republican member like Vern Ehlers have been visionaries when it comes to understanding the role of the internet in Congressional communications, but it is the Democratic members like Speaker Pelosi, Senator Dick Durbin, and Congressman Brad Miller who have been the innovators in actually using the tools to communicate with online communities in governing, probably because the netroots on the left has proven itself as a viable political force. As the right-wing online grows, Republicans will learn and innovate using these tools, and open up the political process on their side as well. So this is clearly a bipartisan movement; Senator Dick Durbin has even gone to Redstate to work on crafting broadband legislation, something no Republican Senator has yet done.

We are in an important cultural moment, and while tools like Twitter are not necessarily important in and of themselves, a ridiculous and humiliating institutional rejection of a member connecting to his or her constituents using a costless technology that allows constituents to talk back and organize is a good place to fight for more openness and transparency in government. As we move forward, we’ll see more fights along these lines, in terms of asking committees to put up video from hearings, but the gist is the same. It’s our Congress.

So Let Our Congress Tweet.

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