RSS
Twitter
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.
