I think a committee meeting in the House is quite a different environment than an "engineering meeting". While King's tweet was obviously not offered in a respectful attitude, I don't think that's something that should be sufficiently problematic to stop real "important business". I find it interesting that this comment focuses on the impropriety of King's tweet instead of the impropriety of making a fuss about this, though obviously both are applicable to your main point that the people in charge are grossly incompetent.
My read on what stopped business wasn't specifically her objection to King's tweet, but the counter-objection to her objection to King's tweet, where the presiding officer claimed that her use of the word "offensive" was uncivil, demanded its retraction, and then everything stalled while points of parliamentary procedure were debated.
I think a committee meeting in the House is quite a different environment than an "engineering meeting".
I mean, they are nominally doing the same sort of work as we'd do designing control flows in software, right? They're looking at a problem, identifying issues, finding dependencies, and then picking a decision-making algorithm (the law) that should address those issues. They use legalese instead of bytecode, but the idea is the same.
The idea that somehow this process should be held to different standards than any other engineering project (especially any other one which impacts so many!) is likely central to the problems we face as a country today.
It's fundamentally a different thing. While the general process of logically working something out should be the same everywhere, the particulars are different. The House is full of politicians and what they say is televised and comprises part of their campaign. Ego always comes first to politicians, not problem-solving, because politicians are elected based on image and appearances, not hard results. Also, when you represent such a wide swath of people with so many conflicting interests, all of your decisions become watered down with so-called "compromise".
Someone wrote on another thread about SOPA that a politician is always campaigning. I believe this to be true. Politics is almost exclusively posturing, and it's reasonable for one to tire of the senseless bloviating, especially when it pertains to technical topics on which the speaker is obviously very poorly informed.
Not saying things should be this way, but that's the way they are.
