The Things You Can (and Can't) Do with a White House Email List

On ABC's This Week this weekend, former Bush White House official Karl Rove criticized the Obama White House for the alleged deed of having "sent out unsolicited e-mails to federal employees asking them to contact their legislation about this bill." Now, if what Rove's saying here were actually true, that would run the risk of violating the Hatch Act that is intended to separate government service and political activity. But let's parse this a bit, because there seems to be some fuzzy thinking at work. Whether or not it makes our brain hurt, the details matter here a great deal. That federal government employees are receiving White House emails on their dot-gov email accounts doesn't seem to be the problem. And anyway, that's up to the agency's themselves to decide the appropriateness of. As for the charge that the emails were "unsolicited," well, here's what the White House's new media director Macon Phillips had to say on the White House blog:

Let's be clear -- and done -- with this incorrect claim: the White House only sends mass messages to email addresses submitted through email signup forms on WhiteHouse.gov. And every message we send has a clear unsubscribe link at the footer to stop receiving messages at any time.

What would be more significant is if the emails from the White House were asking federal employees to take specific political actions, but even the emails being cited by Republican allies contain only a call-to-action that asks recipients to forward the emails' contents on through their address books, or through Twitter, Facebook, etc. Phillips, again, tackles the question of emails requested by federal government employees inappropriately called on them to take specific political actions. Phillips says nuh-uh:

This is simply not true and unless Mr. Rove can point to a White House email making this request of anyone, federal employee or otherwise, he should correct this dangerous and inaccurate assertion.

The spirit of the Hatch Act is really to do away with a direct connection between government employment and political activism. The thinking is that allowing the two to co-exist only opens the door to unseemly political patronage that corrupts the whole idea of a non-political civil service -- which is itself considered one of the better ideas to come out of the administration of government in the American experiment. Is the White House planning to track how many times a federal employee re-tweets their email, and reward their government service on that basis? That's pretty doubtful. The Hatch Act isn't meant to prevent government servants a full life as public citizens. It's to curtail a corrupting quid pro quo. It's difficult to imagine that blast emails from the White House saying "tweet this!" get us into questionable territory.

For students of recent political history, that this particular allegation is coming from Rove is a bit rich, given that he ran political briefings for federal government employees from his perch in the White House. But it's of a piece with a line of attack we've seen bubble up and die down over the last year. Some on the political right, particularly the Rove/FoxNews wing of things, have tried to use some political jiujitsu on the White House's new media operation -- turn a strength against them, that sort of thing. That landed Macon Phillips in mug-shot form on FoxNews this past summer. Andrew Breitbart's Big Government has now picked up the thread. Expect more.