A Political Expirament

In My Humble Opinion
1

On January 2, 2005 I sent letters to both of my Congressmen via their government websites regarding the upcoming nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General. I live in Indiana, so I have Congressmen on both sides of the aisle, Evan Bayh (D) and Richard Lugar ®.

I was dumb-founded by the results. (For the record, I am a registered Democrat who both voted in the last election as well as was politically active for the Democratic Party).

Sen. Lugar sent me a typed response on Congressional letterhead. It was obviously a form letter regarding the subject, but it arrived in a timely manner (~4 weeks later).

Sen. Bayh’s poorly formatted e-mail (it looked like it had been forwarded about 7 times, complete with random paragraph breaks) arrived last Thursday. LAST THURSDAY.

What is so surprising to me is that Bayh’s name is always mentioned on short lists of potential Dems who will be running for President in 2008, and I’m his core. I’ve sent correspondence to Lugar and Bayh in the past, all with the same responses (format, form of letter, etc.), but this was the first after the 2004 elections. I would think that Bayh’s office would put more care into such things.

THE EXPERIMENT:

Pick a subject, and write both of your senators regarding them via their Congressional websites. Try not to make it vitriolic if the senator is someone you don’t particularly care for, but make your position known. Report back here how they respond to you. I’m interested to see if Bayh’s response is typical or atypical of the majority of the Senate.

2

Some additional thoughts:

If you decide to play along, when you report back here, if you’re willing to divulge your particular political leanings (especially if you’re registered and/or voted in the last election), that’d be good info as well. Maybe something along the lines of:

State of residence: Indiana
Voted in last election?: Yes
Registered as?: Democrat
Politically active?: Yes
Senator 1: Richard Lugar ®
Senator 2: Evan Bayh (D)
Senator 1’s Response time: ~ 4 weeks
Senator 2’s Response time: 2 1/2 months
Senator 1’s form of response: Congressional letterhead
Senator 2’s form of response: e-mail (poorly formatted)

3

Your chances of getting a real reply (or even getting your letter personally read by your congressfool) are better if your letter is handwritten, in a civil tone, and doesn’t take its message from a crisis letter (“write your congressgoop now and tell him this!”) from your favorite political group. I have gotten a few personal replies, very few. Congressfolk get lots of mail every day, and most of it is reviewed by aides, and they only show a handful of it to your rep. Every time a bill gets some group riled up, the politico gets a few thousand identical messages prompted by the National Coalition For Something-or-other. These clones are dutifully counted and thrown out.

4

I actually used to be involved in writing responses to constituents for a Senator, so maybe I can shed some light on this.

One, I think it’s rare that you’ll ever get a personal response to a letter. That is, the Senator or Representative will not be writing back to you personally. It may happen if you are a relative or a kid, or if you write into a first-term House member who doesn’t yet have a full schedule. Other than that, most Senators and House members are way too busy to be responding to mail.

Two, the time of your response back depends on what you write about. In our office, if someone wrote in on a popular issue such as gun control, ANWR, agricultural subsidies, etc., we were able to turn a letter around in a matter of days. Sure, the person got a form letter, but it answered his/her concern and explained the Senator’s stance.

If, however, you write on a strange issue or want a detailed response, it takes longer. The letter would have to go from a Legislative Correspondent (LC) to a Legislative Assistant (LA) for review then to the Legislative Director (LD) for final approval. And, if it were necessary, the LCs had time with the Senator each week to ask him about how he would want to respond to it. However, this process could take anywhere from a couple weeks to a month or two. It just depended on the complexity of the letter and the time that legislative staff were able to spend on the mail. In our situation, the legislative staff usually dealt with mail as a last resort, so we had a pretty slow turn-around time for some letters.

Other offices’ had different procedures for dealing with mail. I know one that had to get all mail out by five days. Of course, I don’t think they could have as many unique letters as our office produced – you just can’t turn around thousands of pieces of mail a day and find time to adequately address these concerns with that type of time frame.

Three, as for form letters, let me just say that as I stated above, they are very common in the business. They have to be. A lot of people complained about receiving them, but when you get a few thousand pieces of mail a day there is a necessity to use them. You simply can’t pesonalize a letter to everyone who writes in regarding ANWR. They are all asking for basically the same thing, so one letter should satisfy them. However, there are also times when I would write two or three page letters in response to someone who took issue with my boss’s stance on issues (I always found it much more fun to write letters disagreeing with people than to write letters to supporters).

Four, pretty much every letter is read by an aide of some sort, unless it is an obvious form letter generated by an advocacy group on a certain issue. Then it is put in a batch of other similar letters and responded to as such.

5

A coupla years ago, I wrote my then Senator Paul Wellstone a short e-mail message, thanking him for sticking to his guns and voting against the President’s Iraqi invasion. I was mighty, but pleasantly, surprised when I quickly received a rather lengthy e-mail in response.

Yes, I realize that the likelihood of the message actually being written by Wellstone is rather small, but it pleased me nonetheless. The sentiment was enough, and Wellstone earned himself a voter for life. Sadly, I didn’t get the pleasure of voting for him in the next election.

I’m gonna try writing to Coleman next. Tho’ he doesn’t represent my view, he recently did something in Congress that I approve of (tho’ I forget what exactly - maybe he voted against the Schiavo bill?) and we’ll see what happens there. I’ll report back after I do my research.

6

Well, it definitely wasn’t the Schiavo case. And looking over recent voting, Coleman hasn’t recently done anything that particularly catches my interest. Wish I could remember what it was…

I’m still looking.

7

Ahh - found it. Coleman recently voted against drilling in ANWR, a vote that I support and agree with. I just wrote him a quick, one paragraph message (via his senate website), so we’ll see if anything happens.

8

I actually attempted a version of this experiment a few years ago when congress was debating whether to give the president the authority to invade Iraq. I had a nice, concise letter explaining why I thought it was a bad idea to hand over that much power to the executive branch. I left all references to a “war for oil” out of the letter. My results:

State of residence: North Carolina (then)
Voted in last election?: Yes
Registered as?: Democrat
Politically active?: Yes
Senator 1: Jessie Helms ®
Senator 2: Johnny Edwards (D)
Representative: Bob Etheridge (D) (I think… it had been David Price until the month before. NC districts were screwy, and being redrawn monthly.)
Senator 1’s Response time: Never heard back.
Senator 2’s Response time: 1 week
Rep’s Response time: 3 weeks
Senator 1’s form of response: Never heard back. It surprised me. Sen. Helms’ office had always been courteous and responsive before. To be fair, Sen. Helms was having serious health problems at the time.
Senator 2’s form of response: Typed on congressional letterhead. The letter addressed specific points from my email, and even referred to a previous correspondence. Signed in blue ball-point ink.
Representative’s form of response: Email which addressed some points of my initial email.

In all, I was impressed with Johnny Edwards’ correspondence. Then again, he always struck me as a very nice person. I was unimpressed with Bob Etheridge’s. Like I said, Jessie Helms was having serious health problems at the time, so it may be unfair to compare.

9

Very interesting, Maus. That’s good info. I love to hear stories like your experience with Edwards where such time and effort were returned back to the voter, regardless of the politics.

Renob, thanks for the insight. It still confounds me why two nearly-identical letters would be met with such diametrically different responses though.

10

I would try this, but I think whatever I wrote to Rick Santorum would cause me to experience a “sudden disappearance,” followed by a long hard six months of re-education and an appointment to the local chapter of the GOP as their smiling, friendly public liaison. I’d better not risk it.

11

Dear Mr. Frist,

If I become a vegetable, would you please not pretend that you’re doing me some sort of favor by trying to keep the feeding tube in.

Thank you.
Well, my actually letter will be worded differently but that will be the gist of it. I’ll report back my result if they arrive.

12

I write my Senators all the time.

State of residence: West Virginia
Voted in last election?: Yes
Registered as?: Republican
Politically active?: Yes

Byrd (D) always replies (one month or less) via snail mail. Most of the time it’s a letter that acknowledges what I said and then goes on to say … not much else. (Typical noncommittal politician stuff.) Although once I wrote him about some student loan concerns and his office sent me a huge packet of information, much of which was very helpful. I was really surprised.

Rockefeller (D) never writes back, ever, not even if I’ve written to thank him for something. I get an auto-reply from his website saying “thanks for emailing” and that’s it.

13

If it helps any, I write fairly frequent cranky letters to all sorts of people in government.

I’ve lately taken to writing congratulatory letters to all MPs who express positive opinions of same-sex marriage. I haven’t gotten any letters back, but I assume that’s because this is the gonzo #1 SCARY LEGISLATIVE TOPIC this year, right up there with missile defence, and may be giving eternal favourite health care a run for its money.

Other letters I’ve gotten back include topics such as public transit (provincial government), the inquiry over the APEC incident back in 1997, NAFTA, and the MAI.

On a more local note, a recent letter to a selection of municipal muckeymucks was my response to the astonishing news that some developer was trying to purchase the AIDS memorial park from the city and build something on it. These letters were responded to with a lengthy letter from the city councillor and a personal phone call from the borough mayor, assuring me that such a concept was completely out of the question.

A question for the Americans: in Canada, letters to Parliament require no postage. Is the same true for you?

14

Nope, we have to put a stamp on it. However, members of Congress can send out as much as they want to their constituents - it’s called their “franking priviledge”.

Abbie Carmichael - thanks for the info. It would be good to hear from a West Virginia Democrat on their experiences to see if they differ at all, especially with Rockefeller.