Congress Still Figuring Out E-Mail

Jett writes " Vote.com has an interesting article in their Webmag Fifth Estate about how congressmen have responded to the popularity of e-mail in their daily operations. Quote: 'Of the 440 voting and non-voting House of Representatives members, 22 have no e-mail at all. Even House Speaker Dennis Hastert is wired only halfway -- his office receives e-mail, but does not respond to it. And while all U.S. senators have e-mail, they, like their House counterparts, routinely shun non-constituent mail -- even though they chair committees whose decisions affect the entire country.'"

Comments

They lag permanently.

[MattXVI]

When I worked as a Congressional staffer a couple of years ago, the staffs were stretched pretty thin, even in majority offices. The assumption was that email came third after phone calls and non-photocopied snail mail. Most offices believed that email was too convenient, and the folks who really cared would phone or write a letter. Some offices had been experimenting with context-sensitive auto-responders, but those still have to be double-checked.

Of course, some members of Congress just don't give a flip. Several hundred members are in safe seats, where they really have to screw up to risk losing. It's the others who have the best constituent services, not surprisingly.

Also, keep in mind that Congress attracts lawyers, activists, and a few businessmen. Most are not really tech-savvy (though most are curious). I'd like to make an Al Gore joke here, but you can do that for yourself. For those of you sick of the Al Gore/Internet gaffe, he recently claimed to have discovered and publicized the Love Canal problem in the 80's (he didn't, and it was in the news for a year before he saw it) and he claimed to have written the original Earned Income Tax Credit legislation, which was actually written before he entered Congress. Clinton also credited the growth of the WWW from "50-60 pages to millions of pages", to Al Gore this week.

Reliance on email and internet communication will eventually happen all over Capitol Hill. Just allow for a ten-year lag or so between them and the non-governmental world. They just got used to fax machines in the early 90's.