 A tech-savvy Legislature needs to remember some rules of etiquette and proper legislative behavior. The Senate Rules Committee wants to unplug the chamber just a little – no phones on the floor or in the gallery and only legislative use of the Internet on the state-issued laptops on everyone’s desk.
Citizens in the gallery, who have a bird’s eye view of the Senate floor, have complained about legislators’ extracurricular Internet activities instead of paying attention to business.
Fellow legislators complain, too. Rules Committee member Jayne Mockler says she and the chairman were the only members of an interim committee who were actually listening to public testimony, while everyone else was absorbed in his or her laptop. A matter of courtesy and inattention, the Cheyenne Democrat says. She reports one House member read an entire book on his laptop during a session.
The upstairs Senate doorman is fed up at seeing people sit down in the gallery and immediately take out their Blackberries to send e-mails or text messages, presumably to senators. He’d be happy to enforce a no-phone rule.
But senators protested during a rules debate Friday that they might have to tend to business with a brief text message or e-mail, and they may have to open a Yahoo or Hotmail home page to do so – regardless of how it might look to folks in the gallery.
Mockler says all this connectivity also allows lawmakers to find out what the other chamber is doing and even listen to debate, while their own business is going on. It’s against the rules to color your activity by what the other chamber is doing, after all. Lawmakers also shouldn’t be engaged in dialogue with lobbyists when they should be listening to fellow lawmakers, no matter how uninteresting the discussion seems.
The solution doesn’t require a rules change, just courtesy and self-discipline, although lapses will occur. One former lawmaker says he opened an e-mail attachment from a friend and then turned away to tend to some other task. He turned back to his monitor to see a composite picture of Bill Clinton’s head on the body of a nude male. (Editor's Note: A little background on the rooster…
In recent years, a statue of a rather odd looking rooster has sometimes been seen occupying space in leadership offices in the Wyoming legislature. The rooster, in fact, has become something of a prize in the Capitol – in 2007 it was for a time “kidnapped” and turned up in the Capitol Club, and other places. Was it kidnapped? Not clear. It may be moving about on its own. Certainly, it is proving, in Wyofile, to have a voice of its own.)
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