That’s probably true if every constituent did it just once a week, or even once a month – maybe even once a year (~3 million constituents for a smallish state, over ten million for large states – that’s a lot of phone calls!). Only a tiny percentage of constituents, even in high-passion times like these, make the effort to contact their reps and senators. I don’t think that rule of thumb works if it means one can’t even contact their reps with their concerns once a month.
This hoo-hah is all about politics. “Senator So-and-So is blowing off his constituents!” makes for good press, likewise pointing fingers at elected officials who discover they don’t like “town hall meetings” where they truly catch hell, as opposed to nice civil meet and greet affairs.
You’d think a Senator could set up a private line to handle ordinary office affairs/contacts, another to leave recorded messages about what a shitty job he’s doing, and have social media where others could blow off steam. Meantime, if you really want to provide a service to constituents, have sufficient staff to promptly answer letters.
Of course it’s politics, and in this instance an elected politician appears to be trying to use legal tactics to intimidate a constituent into no longer bothering him. Political, certainly, but still worth criticism, IMO.
I know a lot of people who are calling their representatives every single day. There is an organized effort to get them to understand that many people are unhappy with what is happening.
How can you say it’s incorrect? I was quoting the text.
If mileage may reasonably vary, then any reasonable person should agree that it doesn’t call for legal intervention.
Because the text isn’t interpreted that way.
Well, that’s what he’s saying, at least. We don’t have the Johnson office’s side of the story, and we don’t know what actually happened, but it seems to me that if the office went to the trouble to send him a cease and desist letter, there must be something more to it.
And what I’m not sure about…for instance, he said the one day he called 87 times before he got throught, but the way he said “so they’re aware of my cell number”, suggests that the phone wasn’t busy each time he called. While I don’t know that it’s true, I suspect that he got voice mail and could have left a message.
This isn’t constituent care…he’s not calling about a problem with the VA or his Social Security or whatever that needs a dialogue between him and a staffer. If he’s sharing his opinion on an issue, that can be handled with a message…“You should vote against Gorsuch because he’ll be bad for women.” or something. The fact that he isn’t leaving these messages, but install calling back until he gets an actual staffer to rant at every day is a waste of staff time and ties up the office’s phone lines, keeping other people who need help from getting through.
Back when long-distance calls were expensive, calling the office mattered. Now that it is easy to set up a phone bank to complain - it is arguably harder for a member of Congress to bother staff the phones and get the pulse of their tens of thousands of constituents.
Good piece on the protests at town halls here:
Such b/c he is telling his constituents to only write letters to him doesn’t mean the letters will be read . I think it would best to write a letter and send it to all the local newspapers then there would be a better chance of the senator seeing it .
Senator Johnson has somewhere north of 6.5 million constituents.
Your rule of thumb would imply that it is unreasonable to call him more than once a decade, since if everyone did so, his office couldn’t possibly keep up.
Still, they’re better off than Californians, who could reasonably call their Senators slightly less often than once a lifetime.
If you tell your Senator that your name is Edson L. Huntington and that you would like him to vote to impeach Jeff Sessions, why do you need to call him again tomorrow and tell him the same thing?
I dunno. Why did House Republicans vote to repeal the ACA, get stopped in the Senate, then try again ~60 more times? Because they thought it mattered to repeatedly make their feelings known (or at least what they presented as their feelings) even if was futile.
Let’s stipulate that I don’t “need” to, that what I’m trying to do is to apply political pressure by reminding him every day of my desires as a constituent. Are you proposing that a different reason for calling each day would be protected speech, but repeating a previous opinion is not protected speech?
Of course it is protected speech, but that doesn’t mean that your Senator or anyone else is required to listen to all of it.
You concede that the purpose of your speech is not to inform but to “apply political pressure” and to “remind him every day.” He is not really being unreasonable by refusing to play along with those types of demands.
His office, the phones, and the staff are all paid for by taxpayers, and it is not beyond the pale for him to set a “one per customer” policy. The constituent has made his feelings known on Sessions. Check. Let’s leave the staff free and the phones open for other constituents to call in instead of allowing the switchboard to become the personal property of those who insist on calling with the same message over and over.
The Senator is only telling one (1) constituent that he can no longer call the Senator’s office, but that the constituent can still contact the Senator by mail. One.
Sure, trying to legally intimidate a constituent for trying to express himself isn’t so bad! It’s only one more than all the other Senators, so far as we know.
Strom Thurmond only impregnated one underage domestic worker – just one more than the other Senators. Not so bad.
Sure. I do think it means he ought not be calling in law enforcement on a one-per-day call.
Your proposal–that calls on different issues is fine, but calls on the same issue is not–sounds to me very much like content-based speech restrictions in the political realm. That’s not cool.
I think you are mischaracterizing this as some sort of government suppression of speech.
This constituent is not being jailed because of unpopular political views. The Senator, like any other person in charge of an office, is permitted to set reasonable limits on an individual or individuals calling or visiting his office in a persistent way that disturbs the normal workflow.
Free speech is certainly at its zenith when a constituent is attempting to persuade his Congressman, but as noted, this individual has called 77 times in 3 days. Nobody can say that his views have not been able to be stated. Further, he can continue to email his same views or write them in a letter. He can hold demonstrations in the park, start a web blog or engage in a thousand other forms of speech. Nobody’s voice is being silenced.
If this constituent was standing in the middle of the office mumbling “Fuck Jeff Sessions” over and over and over and over again, would you believe that his ejection was a content-based speech restriction?
I think we’re getting off the point by calling this a speech issue rather than a petition issue.