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Oops! New GOP leader's Web site points to a Dem

Web site for Eric Cantor, soon to be GOP House majority leader, points visitors to Democrat-controlled majorityleader.house.gov.

Declan McCullagh Former Senior Writer
Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. You can e-mail him or follow him on Twitter as declanm. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.
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Declan McCullagh
2 min read

The Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives wasn't quite as successful online.

This evening, incoming House majority leader Eric Cantor's Web site began directing visitors to links at majorityleader.house.gov.

The problem? It's still owned and operated by Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Democrat who has been House Majority leader since 2007 and has been using the Web site to denounce Republicans as recently as a few hours ago. Anyone clicking on Cantor's links got 404 errors instead of details he promised about congressional reforms (see related CNET story).

Web site for Eric Cantor, next GOP House majority leader, mistakenly points visitors to Democrat-controlled majorityleader.house.gov a day too soon, yielding 404 errors.
Web site for Eric Cantor, next GOP House majority leader, points visitors to Democrat-controlled majorityleader.house.gov, yielding 404 errors. (It would have been more interesting if the Democrats realized this and posted a response.)

Cantor won't officially start his new gig until the House of Representatives meets at noon ET tomorrow. That's when the new Congress convenes and Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) is expected to be elected House speaker.

For his part, Hoyer has already retitled his Web site "The Office of Democratic Whip," and it's not clear why the switchover didn't happen or what caused the glitch. The 404 errors affected at least the blog and newsroom sections of Cantor's Web site.

Boehner's Web transition was smoother. He's already taken over the Speaker.gov Web site and announced the new SpeakerBoehner Twitter account.

This isn't the first time that elections have led to rocky transitions among politicians' Web sites.

When WhiteHouse.gov switched hands from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, it briefly sported the line "Insert Something Meaningful Here" and suffered from some broken links and 404 errors.

And President Obama's initial try at a WhiteHouse.gov Web site was also buggy. The site administrators posted an entry saying Obama "was sworn in" before that happened; another post titled "Read the Inaugural Address" was blank an hour after Obama finished giving it; some photo captions were incorrect; and the search option didn't work reliably.