Rep. Justin Amash

Politico's Jennifer Martinez writes up how the brand-new Republican leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives is eager to bake new technologies into their style of governing:

On Tuesday, the House passed a bill to eliminate mandatory printing for every bill and resolution by axing the Government Printing Office -- an initiative “crowd-sourced” by the public on YouCut. In addition, three new government subsidies were added to YouCut for the public to vote on.

Social media’s “real potential lies in organizing government itself and how it functions,” said Matt Lira, new-media director for Cantor, who spearheaded YouCut’s launch. “There was skepticism by some that these tools work well in the opposition, but can they work in government? I think they do, and proving that has begun.”

GOP leaders want their colleagues to master these tools, too. On Friday, the House Republican Conference vice chairman’s office and House Republican New Media Caucus are hosting a briefing for all House GOP staffers to sharpen their social media strategies. A triumvirate of social media heavyweights will speak: Facebook’s Adam Conner, YouTube’s Steve Grove and Twitter’s first D.C. hire, Adam Sharp.

Part of the subtext here is, at the risk of sounding cynical, House Republicans are also quite eager to have people start to appreciate that they're framing their approach to running a legislature around what new technologies make possible. That's not at all to say that it's all PR, not at all. Long-time activists from the transparency and good government worlds report that they're finding a refreshing level of commitment amongst these newly-empowered Republican staffers and members of Congress, and a receptiveness to using new tools to open up the governing process.

"Two weeks of voting, two cuts passed," Cantor's new media director Lira writes in an email to techPresident. "Ideas directly from the people, selected by them on YouCut, passed the House. That's as real as public involvement over the Internet gets and has ever been."

But this new wave of Republicans is also planting a flag on this stuff while making entirely sure that people are seeing them plant a flag on this stuff. Take what Darrell Issa had to say in a statement when he made freshman Justin Amash the second in command of his House Oversight Committee's subcommittee on the federal workforce, postal service, and labor policy. Issa said that Amash's mastery of social media, something he recently trotted over to Facebook to discuss in his second week in Congress, "will prove instrumental in advancing an agenda that aims to meet the American people's expectation of a government that is efficient, transparent and accountable." The historical record will reflect that the possession of superior Facebook skills have never before factored into what a House chairman uses to justify appointing a new member to a subcommittee post.

The short of it: Republicans in the House are making technology-enabled openness, transparency, and participation central to the public presentation of their core political values in a way that their Democratic counterparts never fully did.