Which would be incorrect. The government is allowed to deny equal protection to;
Minors
Those under 21 from drinking
Holding a draft
Denying rights based on felony convictions
Etc
Pretty sure any citizen has the right to call any representative and not just their own.
For instance, if a senator on the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry committee is not from my state I could still have a legitimate reason to call him/her.
New information says that the cease and desist may be related to voters showing up at the Senator’s Wisconsin offices asking for a town hall.
IF it’s only been sent to a single person, that could change the calculus a bit - things can happen in person that might warrant such a response, though I’m hard-pressed to find something that would warrant this response but no call to the police at the time. Rumors of the letter going to many more people muddy those waters, however. Now I’m on the “wait and see” wagon about the whole ordeal.
Interesting debate? So many assumptions. So few facts.
Who is actually making these repeated calls to the Senator’s office?
Is there more than one person repeatedly calling the Senator’s office?
Is/are he/she/they actually constituents of the Senator?
I assume a judge has signed off on this cease and desist letter. I also assume that evidence was presented to the judge.
It seems that the caller(s) do have access to the Senator, but not via telephone.
You do not need a judge to sign off on a cease and desist letter.
You do need a judge for a cease and desist order.
The letter is basically just a warning that if the person/organization does not stop whatever it is that legal action will likely be the next step.
<sigh> 14th Amendment jurisprudence regarding “equal protection of the law” isn’t exactly hard to understand.
The Supreme Court has set three basic rules for reviewing if someone is being denied equal protection of the law.
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Because the courts aren’t supposed to be legislators, and since all laws “discriminate” between people (treating those committing felonies differently than those who don’t, for a simple example), the courts will not scrutinize most laws beyond determining if the legislature had a legitimate purpose and the legislation is rationally related to that purpose. It’s very rare that laws are found to be a violation of equal protection on this basis.
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Where a specially protected class of people (for example, “blacks”), or a fundamental right of persons in the US (for example, voting) is involved, the courts scrutinize the law more carefully. Here, the legislature must have identified a compelling state interest, and the legislation must be necessary to solve that interest. Rarely does the Supreme Court uphold legislation that has a discriminatory effect upon a protected class or right under this scrutiny.
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Where there is a classification that is not so “suspect”, but which does raise significant questions, a middle ground is adopted. The most common such classification is gender. Here, an important state interest must be involved, and the classification must be substantially related to solving that interest.
Now, it should be abundantly clear from this calculus that it is quite possible to deny someone “equal protection” of the law, if you use a strict analysis for all cases. Indeed, with very few exceptions, a person who is a member of a class of persons treated differently under a law is rarely going to get protection from the courts, unless they can show that the class in question is a suspect class. Hence the question which was asked about the equal protection claim here: what is the class being discriminated against, and how are they suspect? Because if they are not, then the attempt to treat them differently would only be precluded if there is no possible permissible governmental issue being addressed, or the actions of the Senator’s office were not rationally related to that purpose. Which makes the statement by *Little Nemo a bit irrelevant.
However, it’s NOT correct to say that the government is allowed to deny equal protection to such groups. It’s more accurate to say that the government is allowed to deny equal treatment to such groups.
You are not imagining the most egregious case. The most egregious is that a small group of people is calling over and over constantly. They aren’t being hung up on before they get to state their views. They’re being hung up on because they’ve already called thirty times today and the person answering it recognizes their voice.
I agree that a daily call is not harassment or excessive.
Might well be. I don’t think I have enough info to judge.
But such a letter could be reasonable.
It could be. Even in that hypothetical, though, I can fault the senator for piss-poor public relations.
If Joan Smith is calling his office thirty times a day, mention that shit in the letter. Say:
Then follow up with a request to limit calls two one per day.
The absence of any such information in the letter makes me think they either don’t know what the hell they’re doing, or else the calls really aren’t all that bad.
It’s amazing how much we can infer if we simply follow our biases. Is there any reason you don’t want to wait until we actually know the facts? Is it so important to come to a conclusion beforehand?
Well, since there is such a thing as a vexatious litigant, perhaps there can be such a thing as a vexatious petitioner.
It was sent to a single person. Here’s the story:
SUPER IMPORTANT, and what a super valuable contribution to the thread, John!
Well, I thought it was super-duper, but if you think it’s just “super”, that’s OK!
To me this is a non-story. If a guy calls my office 77 times in three days, I’m telling him to piss off as well.
The thread title is misleading. He is not telling his “constituents” that they may not come to his office. He is telling this one single crank to quit attempting to monopolize his staff’s time.
He called until he got through. Why is that not reasonable?
Thanks, that’s helpful!
But there’s something in it that confuses me. If he’s calling 87 times because the first 86 he doesn’t get through, that doesn’t strike me as unreasonable or harassing at all. It’s only unreasonable/harassing if he’s successfully getting through several times a day.
Surely making a single successful contact with your senator each day isn’t a DOS.
That article makes it sound as though he’s just making the single successful contact each day. Is that how others read it?
He’s calling every single day. He says so himself. YMMV, but that seems excessive to me.
Why is talking to one’s Senator (or his office) once a day, if one thinks the issue is very important, unreasonable?
If every constituent did that, it would prevent the office from functioning properly. Unless I have some special needs, I like to use, as a good rule of thumb, to not do things with public resources that if everyone did the same, it would cause problems.
What if he —gasp – wrote more than one letter a day? Would that be the end of our country, too?