for historical reference -
(post shortened, underline added)
Did you read the OP? What started out as a fake news claim that an “activist group” had been told not to call or visit a Senator’s office has been whittled down to just one (1) constituent who seems to have made a pest of himself. As usual, the actual facts are slowly being discovered.
I don’t think it’s either. It’s a harassment issue. Obviously a senator’s constituents have the right to contact them and give their opinions, but if somebody is calling multiple times a day, every day, that can easily extend past opinion sharing and into harassment. Somebody from Johnson’s office has claimed the letter was sent because of:
and that they issued the guy the letter on the advise of the Capitol Police.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but what it seems to me is, I’m sure that this guy isn’t the only one who’s been calling Johnson’s office, or even calling Johnson’s office with critical comments. This is the only one, it looks like, he sent a letter like that to. So this guy must be doing something above and beyond just calling and complaining.
It may well be that the guy was engaged in legitimately harassing behavior. I have two claims: first is that merely calling once a day in no way comprises harassment. Second, if he was threatening, or if he was otherwise engaging in real harassment, that should have been mentioned in the letter.
Calling the OP fake news is a contemptible misapplication of the term. I was incorrect about a detail, but it was inadvertent, and I acknowledge the correction as soon as someone found it.
He called 83 times one day, not once. And as for the phrasing of the letter, I assume it was a regular form for a cease and desist letter. You don’t necessarily want to mention specific accusations of behavior.
As for the “false news” thing, I don’t think it’s false news as such. I do think it’s something that’s being intentionally blown out of proportion by people with an agenda in order to fit a narrative. I’m not saying you’re doing this, but people certainly are, so a story about a senator dealing with a troublesome constituent gets turned into “they’re trying to prevent our voices from being heard” and fitting into the general story about the backlash at town halls over the ACA repeal and some Republican elected officials, including Senator Johnson, not hosting them to avoid the confrontation. And, groups like Citizen Action of Wisconsin are implying that the letter is against them, which doesn’t appear to be true. Note, of course, they’re not saying anything that’s literally untrue…they’re saying “the people who come to our actions get” cease and desist letters, and it’s true that Good came to some of their actions and got a cease and desist letter. But, of course, it’s misleading, because they’re suggesting it’s a regular occurrence, which it isn’t.
The full quote from the article is that “on one occasion he called Senator Johnson’s office 83 times until someone picked up.” Calling 83 times, getting through once, IMO falls on the acceptable side of the line as far as number of calls.
If there are other problems, e.g., he’s yelling at people and calling them nasty names and threatening to kick their asses if he sees them around town, those other problems might qualify as harassing. But calling until you get through? I don’t care if he calls 2,000 times in a row, if he stops after the first time he gets through each day, that’s not harassment.
(Note, of course, that this applies to a government institution. If he were doing the same thing to his ex-girlfriend, that’d be a different can of worms).
He’s not doing anything that requires a conversation, though. Let him leave a damn message instead of tying up the line. He doesn’t have to call them every day, and the fact that he’s willing to call 83 times in a day until somebody picks up the phone is itself a sign of crankness. Johnson may work for the people of Wisconsin, but that doesn’t mean he works for this guy particularly, and he absolutely should have the right to put limits on this guy. If you think otherwise, I just have to assume you’ve never worked anywhere where you’ve had to take calls from the public.
So have we all agreed that the thread title and OP are inaccurate? That Senator Johnson didn’t send a letter to “constituents” (plural), but just one particularly-persistent constituent? If so, this seems like a nothing-burger.
That it’s a single lonely dude, rather than a George Soros funded activist group, makes the attempt at legal intimidation worse, not better, IMO.
On call 84, when the phone is finally picked up, how long a conversation is required in order to satisfy the senator’s duty?
Question 2: what budget should be allocated to each senator to hire staff to answer constituent phone calls? I’m confident that every senator would welcome a personal call center crew.
I don’t know how long a conversation is required. Hanging up right away would merit a callback; after two minutes, it’s cool if they decide to get the dude off the phone. The lack of a strict dividing line does not mean judgment on this issue is impossible.
As for question 2, senators can use their ample office budget however they wish. If they want to be available to constituents, they should be available to all constituents.
The problem with your second paragraph is that math exists.
Taking your two minutes goal as a standard, let’s imagine an IVR system (itself an expense) and enough phone lines to handle all calls. (“Your call is very important to us; please stand by.”)
A single call taker who never needs lunch or bathroom breaks can handle 30 calls in an hour, or 240 calls in an eight hour day. That’s an unattainable-in-real-life best case number. Agreed? We can’t do better than 240 calls per day with one single human being talking to each caller for two minutes?
The problem with your math is that the real world exists :).
I said that after two minutes, hanging up might be appropriate. You’re suggesting that a lot of different people will try to stay on the phone for two minutes. I’m not sure that’s true. When I’ve called about issues, I generally am off the phone in less than sixty seconds.
The other thing is that senators get a little less than a million dollars a year for personnel expenses. What’s more, the majority of senate interns are unpaid.
We’ll need significantly more evidence before deciding that handling a single two-minute call a day from a particularly active constituent is unmanageable.
Play with numbers some more: let’s say that dealing with a two-minute call really takes three minutes. If someone makes 365 such calls a year, that’s taking about 18 hours of staff time total during the year. Figuring the staff work 2,000 hours a year, and that half of the calls are taken by staff assistants, and the other half by interns, we’re talking about an average salary of about $18,000 a year for those taking the calls. The very most involved callers in this respect would cost $162 annually.
Spending that much annually on the very most involved constituents does not strike me as unreasonable.
I am suggesting that, because it’s clear to me that if caller’s goal is not simply to communicate his position on a particular issue. If it were, daily calls would not be necessarily.
I’m suggesting that if I were to adopt your standard as a required minimum, any reasonably active group could cause a senator to breach the standard you advance.
How many NRA members could be recruited to call senators who oppose a national reciprocal carry concealed law?
Sure. But one of those positions is a chief of staff, who has to live in the DC Metro area. That’s over $100K for anyone decent. Legislative aides need legal experience - how many and how much?
Etc.
Well, there’s a possible answer. Recruit a force of unpaid interns. Pass a bill to make the country pay for a massive shared IVR phone system for all of Congress’ use.
I could see that as a solution.
“If you know the name of the senator or representative whose office you wish to reach, press one. To use your ZIP code to find your legislators, press two.”
I disagree. A Senator, an elected official in his office, is clearly a representative of the government. This is a case of government rights versus citizen rights; and the balance should always be biased far towards the citizen. A constituent’s right to petition the government far outweighs a Senator’s right to avoid harassment.
That said, the right to petition is not unlimited. The Senator’s office handled this poorly by directing this policy at one person (which was the equal protection issue I’ve mentioned). It would have been a lot better to have instituted a policy saying something like nobody can call more than fifteen times a day and applying it to everyone.
I urge you to re-read DSYoungESQ’s cogent analysis of the applicability of equal protection caselaw to the issue at hand.
I read it. I feel his post (and madsircool’s) missed the point here by only discussing equal protection of groups. It’s certainly true that a group of people can be a protected class. But it’s also true that the government can violate the rights of a single individual and that’s the issue here.
Earl Good obviously doesn’t have to prove he’s a member of some protected class. He has a letter citing him by name. He’s a class of one.
Now I realize the class of one doctrine is a little murky. But the Supreme Court has acknowledged it exists in Olech and Engquist. And given its existence, Good seems to have a good shot at invoking it:
It’s not murky, but it is weighed under the rational basis standard. And you realize (I hope) that in Engquist the Supreme Court declined to extend the class-of-one to a public employment context, yes? I wouldn’t quote it for an argument of broad applicability.
I agree with you that the government can violate the rights of a single individual. Except, in this case, the policy isn’t directed against him individually.
I mean, lets say you were to call your senator multiple times a day and go to one of his state offices and threaten his staff. Your senator might send you a cease and desist letter too. The class isn’t “Earl Good” or “hypothetical Little Nemo”. The class is “people who constantly call their Senators and go to Senate offices to threaten Senate employees.” You two just would be members of that greater class of people.