I’m late to this, but considering my experience covering the Hill as non-credentialed media, I thought I’d share some thoughts.
Let’s dispense with the obvious: Etheridge assaulted the kid. Assaults like this happen every day in any number of contexts and are very rarely prosecuted, so I’m not willing to go so far asGlenn Greenwald and say that Etheridge should be arrested and tried. Moreover, I’m fairly certain this happened on Capitol Grounds which is a kind of magical area for Senators and Members of Congress in which they are virtually immune from arrest. This is a murky area of law; so far as I understand the Constitution gives Congress the power to make their own rules and they are responsible for policing themselves. Where do I get such a strange idea? Well, that’s a decent segue to my next point…
Etheridge is not a lonely perp when it comes to lawmakers somehow believing they have the right to lay hands on people they consider to be disagreeable. Recall my incident with John Cornyn - a former Attorney General! I learned that the Capitol Police cannot take a complaint against a Senator or Member of Congress. Any compliant must be filed with the Sergeant at Arms.
There have been several other minor assaults that I haven’t reported (including one by another former prosecutor, now a Representative). Innumerable staff have laid unwanted hands upon me. I’ve stopped reporting these incidents for several inter-related reasons.
The first is that they are invariably trivial; nobody is punching me in the face or tackling me or engaging in any real violence. Instead it’s been staff deliberately walking into me to separate me from the principal they are protecting (most common) or aggressive touching to either block the camera or turn me around so that I’m not pointing the camera at them (it’s also a type-A show of control). In short, the behaviors are obnoxious and annoying (and inexcusable), but not truly threatening or fear-inducing.
The second reason I no longer report these things is that I’ve learned to put myself in their shoes. I am by no means coddling these people, but here’s a not-uncommon scenario: Politician is walking with staffer engaged in conversation about I-don’t-know-what. I’ve been trying to catch up with said politician, so I seize the opportunity. I turn on the camera, train it on the pol and begin walking alongside waiting for an opportunity to introduce myself. Politician sees camera recording his conversation, gets peeved. That actually happened to me and if you watched the Cornyn video linked above, you witnessed it. That doesn’t excuse Cornyn’s behavior, but as weeks passed and I learned the ropes around the Capitol a bit more, I realized that I could have handled the situation much better myself. Ultimately, about a month ago, I apologized to Cornyn (actually, his back, he still won't talk to me) for my own handling of the matter. Of course, I didn’t let him off the hook; I told him that I still believed that he was way in error for escalating the situation into a physical confrontation.
Another way I put myself in their shoes is in realizing that I do not have media credentials and am a complete unknown to these folks. Approaching them with a camera running and attempting impromptu interviews isn’t, to say the least, a best practice. Much to my discredit, that was my approach when I first got to the Hill. I had been “blogified” - for too long I had watched the news and witnessed the shameful lack of an oppositional, skeptical press. On the other hand, the blogosphere was (and is) filled with insightful and unmerciful commentators that demand and, in their own way, achieve, accountability on a daily basis. The conversations I find most appealing are unvarnished, unflinching and uncompromised expositions of everything that is wrong about our too-often corrupt politics and the power-worshipping press that consistently and dismally ignores its 4th Estate function. I was determined to bring something different to Washington and made some bad assumptions. My first mistake was assuming that nobody would talk to me, so I tried forcing the issue. That’s why I always approached with the camera rolling.
It turns out that, for the most part, these folks will give you a few minutes. Not all of them do - Bernie Sanders, for example, hasn’t given me diddly, even as he tells progressives that we need a progressive press to counter the right’s noise machine - but a sizable majority are willing to spend a couple of minutes speaking with me when I’ve got something to ask. Ultimately, I’ve learned that the Rachel Maddow approach is much better than that of Jason Mattera or the two kids that approached Etheridge. So now I introduce myself, ask if they’d take a few questions on video (or audio if they prefer), accept their answer (if it’s “no” I give them my card and tell them that I hope they’ll find time in the future) and establish with them that I’m not an asshole, I’m a journalist. I suspect that if I had taken that approach with Senator Cornyn, he’d be willing to talk with me from time to time.
One more thing that should be remembered is that every single politician in the United States is fully aware of what a “Macaca moment” is. Unfortunately, many of them blame the camera rather than blaming the stupid man that used the racial slur. The YouTube age is still relatively new. Politics is like poker in that you don’t get to the final table (Congress) by taking a lot of chances. They see a camera, remember what’s happened to George Allen, Trent Lott and many, many others, and make the entirely rational decision that if they don’t engage, they won’t be singed. Moreover, with a compliant, lapdog press waiting back in the gallery, why take chances with the random guy in the street?
One last point about the too-common physical confrontations: ultimately, the situation is grossly unfair. I’ve said it before: If I cannot lay hands on a Senator or Representative without risking being shot (a real risk, as anyone that has seen the assault weapons carried by Capitol Hill Police can attest to - they don’t even carry tasers), how can they possibly justify doing it to me? Moreover, when it happens, if someone is going to face consequences, it will be me. I already have. Let me direct you back to the Cornyn video.
There are cameras everywhere in DC that capture every square inch, both inside the buildings and outside. Every movement is recorded, if not observed. When Cornyn assaulted me (it was an assault), a cop was standing less than 15 feet away. I had followed every rule and been completely within my legal rights (even if my actions were less than optimally social). But I was the one detained. For about 30 minutes.
That was far from the only time I’ve been detained for being a journalist and asking unwelcome questions. Virginia Foxx alone has reported me to the Capitol Police on at least five occasions. Each time they detain me for 15-20 minutes while they run a check for warrants and establish that I’ve done nothing wrong. all in all, I’ve been through the experience at least 25 times. Each time I was set loose after it was determined that I was completely within my rights and had not committed any offense.
That’s bad enough, but it’s understandable. When a Member of Congress calls the cops, I’m not going to be upset with the police for investigating (the Member of Congress is another story; they are clearly abusing their power and wasting police resources, simply because they don‘t like being questioned). What bothers me is when a situation like the one with Cornyn arises. More than once, police have stopped me of their own accord simply because I was asking questions of Senators, committee witnesses, etc. That get’s to be a really difficult situation.
To begin with, they have no plausible cause to detain me. But how do you tell a cop that? How do you say, “Sorry, sir, but you are wrong about the law. I’m perfectly entitled to do what I’m doing and I won’t (and can’t) stop doing my job.” Police are trained to assert authority and demand unflinching compliance. I generally ask to have them call their Sergeant to clear things up, but even that is often taken as impudence. (It’s at those moments I’m grateful Capitol Police don’t carry tasers). Anyway, the point here is that the entire racket is set up to protect the powerful. Through persistence, a willingness to self-examine and learn from mistakes, and true earnestness, I’ve been able to navigate these largely unchartered waters, but the seas have been choppy at times.
Before I go, one last point on the Etheridge video. Compare it to the Cornyn video. Any difference is superficial, at best. The Etheridge video has been seen far and wide; Politico did an entire story on it and it was splayed across our tv sets all day yesterday. The Cornyn video was mentioned in passing in a Politico story about an entirely different subject (the Republican objection to being asked questions about the Franken Amendment), but was otherwise not seen anywhere except DailyKos and starkReports (the two places I posted it). If you doubt the existence of a Republican noise-machine, let this be a lesson.