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According to The Bachmann Blog's latest post, Rep. Michael Capuano, (D-MA), wants to make blogging congresscritters go through a process before being permitted to post on blogs or YouTube. Here's a portion of Rep. Capuano's letter to Rep. Brady, (D-PA), chair of the Committee on House Administration:
As you are aware, current CHA regulations have been interpreted to prohibit Members from posting official content outside the .gov domain. Unfortunately, many members who wish to display vidoe on their websites have found that the existing tools available within the House to do so are not user-friendly or efficient, and in that addition, server storage space within the House is insufficient to meet the growing demand for video.
The House Leadership and your committee began to examine solutions to this situation last year and the Franking Commission recently engaged in detailed discussions of possible solutions. Specifically, we discussed the ongoiong effort to establish designated House "channels" on external sites. This would allow a Member to post video on a qualifying external site and then embed the video on his or her Member site from this external site. The concept of an "official" external channel has been adopted by other government agencies and it could be available to the House in short order if the relevant CHA regulations and practice is amended.
Here's another key portion of Rep. Capuano's letter:
To the maximum extent possible, the official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House's compliance guidelines.
That section sounds eerily close to censorship. Each representative reports to We The People, not the Franking Commission or the Committee on House Administration. The information that Michele Bachmann or Eric Cantor posts on their blogs or on YouTube is information about the people's business.
Rep. Capuano's suggestion that this be regulated in any way is an assualt on a legislator's ability to communicate with his/her constituents. That's totally unacceptable. Any attempt to regulate, restrict or inhibit electronic forms of communication between a legislator and their constituents is a potential restriction on a constituent's right to know.
We The People won't stand for that.
Comments welcome at LFR. |
