Revealed: How a mysterious social media account is influencing Congress

11 March 2024

On X, formerly Twitter, @ringwiss has at least 14,000 followers and regularly tweets about the United States' congressional procedures.

Many X users have wondered who @ringwiss is, and according to Politico's Gabe Fleisher, he isn't from the U.S., but rather, is Kacper Surdy — a 20-year-old economics student at Durham University in England.

Surdy was born in Poland, but has lived in the U.K. most of his life. And he is clearly fascinated by the United States' congressional system.

"In fact," Fleisher explains in an article published by Politico on March 8, "@ringwiss has never even stepped foot in the Capitol, much less worked there…. Surdy may live some 5000 miles from Washington, but he has a favorite Senate presiding officer, Cory Booker, and a favorite House procedure: defeat of the previous question, last seen in 1988."

Fleisher adds, "When he gets home from classes, he immediately turns on the live-feeds of the House and Senate floors and keeps them on in the background for the rest of the night."

The Politico reporter notes that Surdy's tweets "often take on an educational function."

"A recent thread on defeating the previous question — which has taken on a fresh importance as Democrats consider using it to move a Ukraine aid package — fetched 67,000 views," Fleisher observes. "Another breaking down the parliamentary errors in a recent judicial opinion on House proxy voting was seen by more than 200,000."

Fleisher continues, "His missives are always meticulously backed up by evidence, be they clips unearthed from deep in the C-SPAN archives or highlighted screenshots of Deschler's Precedents, an 18-volume House reference book. He often corrects even lawmakers themselves about the rules of their own chambers."

Matt Glassman, a congressional scholar at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., is quite impressed by Surdy's knowledge of Congress.

Glassman told Politico, "When we think of the best of Twitter, of what it could be, it's when you find a guy like this, who as best I can tell, is sitting in London watching congressional procedure obsessively, when his knowledge can be unleashed to both elite audiences in D.C.… and really, anybody who wants to understand what's going on."

Read Politico's full report at this link.

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