Indiana

SO THESE ARE THE NEW RULES

By Abdul Hakim-Shabazz

By now you’ve heard that Republican Congressional candidate Jon Elrod was captured on video by Democratic operatives handing campaign literature to a House staffer to mail.  There’s no question that is against the rules of using state employees to politic on government time.  Elrod made a stupid mistake and the voters will have to decide if it rises to the level of not being elected to Congress.  I personally don’t it matters much in the grand scheme of things, but Elrod should remember when you’re a candidate, you’re under the microscope and everything you do is subject to scrutiny.

But there is a bigger issue here.  I was at the Statehouse today and from what I was  able to gather, not a lot of people on either side of the aisle were too happy about how this all went down.  As one lawmaker put it, “this changes the rules and we are going into new territory and opened a can of worms.”

What they meant was that anyone with a video camera can go into the House gallery and record what lawmakers are doing while sitting at their desks.  This means they can get video of lawmakers playing solitaire, booking airline reservations, shopping on eBay and even visiting their campaign websites all with government computers on government time.  And God forbid someone accidentally turns off the spam pop-up blocker.  It may not be against the law, but just imagine the campaign commercial in a tight race or primary?

And why even bother with a video camera, a simple freedom of information request of lawmakers’ e-mail accounts, remember these are government computers, and see what type of correspondence has been going on. And who knows what potentially embarrassing e-mail is out there.   Granted none of it may be illegal, but the potential for a lot of  embarrassment is there.

And now that we have gone into the realm of  video taping lawmakers to achieve a political advantage in a race that publicly some people say should be no contest, all bets are off.

This should be fun to watch.

Full post as published by Indiana Barrister on February 14, 2008 (boomark / email).