House Democrats wants to restrict commercial advertisements from appearing on external websites such as YouTube that members connect with their official sites.

The justification made is that Democrats don’t want tax dollars to go toward endorsing private business.

Republicans support the idea of placing restrictions on the members’ sites, but not on private businesses whose sites receive visitors because lawmakers have linked to them.

However, current House regulations do not allow this practice, so they are currently violating House rules.
Members of the Congressional Commission on Mailing Standards have put forward two separate sets of recommendations to clear matters up.

Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.), who chairs the commission, has proposed to identify official House information that is posted on websites outside of its domain and to restrict — “to the maximum extent possible” — House content from being posted on websites with commercial or political information.

He also suggested notifying users when they are taken from the House website to an external website as well as maintaining a list of outside websites that meet House requirements.

“We’re not trying to deal with content at all,” said Capuano, who does not have any videos on his website. “The only thing I’m concerned about is that if you post some video, you don’t see some commercial right next to it. You do that with YouTube right now, and we don’t control what ads you see — it could be political content, it could be a Viagra commercial — and don’t get me wrong, maybe the Republican leadership needs a Viagra commercial on their webpage, but I don’t really need one.”

Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.), the ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, and Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Tom Price (R-Ga.) have put forward the competing proposal.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) is rallying against some of Capuano’s suggestions, saying they could limit the ability of members to communicate with constituents by prohibiting them from using websites like YouTube.

“We should be encouraging websites that spread information about the issues and debates we deal with on Capitol Hill, not walling ourselves off from scrutiny,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for Boehner.

But the GOP proposal makes many of the same points that Capuano’s does, voicing concerns for separating commercial content from official House content, as well as possibly creating special “channels” that would be dedicated solely to official House content.

Ehlers’s office said that members should be held accountable for violating the House rules, instead of, as Capuano has suggested, asking companies like YouTube to cease carrying advertisements on pages hosting the video content of members.

“We shouldn’t be setting rules for the vendor to comply with; rather, the compliance to the content regulations should be upon the members. It’s their responsibility to be compliant,” said Salley Collins, spokeswoman for the Committee on House Administration’s GOP office.

Capuano disagreed.

“Vern [Ehlers] wants to have a rule that will once and for all presume that we can guess what the next technology will be,” Capuano said. “The only difference between us [is that] I say I know the technology is there to do what we want to do now. YouTube has basically told us they would probably do it. Why can’t we take one step at a time?”