So I’m from SC, both of my senators are very special. I’ve tried several times to get into contact with them but I never get a phone call back or an email response.
Do senators just not see what you say in their contract forms, or do they not care? Are they not required to respond?
To elaborate on the situation, I’ve sent in about 3 contact forms to Lindsey graham, and 1 to Tim Scott. What’s a bit interesting is Graham actually delayed the bill recently after I sent several emails regarding the specifics of the bill. I wanted to ensure the bill would be passed but with some sort of regulation so it doesn’t screw up our ties with the Saudis, or open up the potential for endless lawsuits against governments like the US. It’s a slippery slope that there is no recovering from. However I firmly believe it should be passed, but I can definitely understand the problems and reasoning behind not passing it.
So my question here is simple, do Senators actually read what we tell them, how often do they respond to emails/phone numbers? I haven’t even received an automated message. Yet he went out in public and stated basically exactly what I said in my previous messages. Am I being dismissed as a troll? Or is he genuinely too busy to respond or even have his staffers respond?
Senators are under no obligation to respond. Generally, they will have a “constituent services” staff member/intern/volunteer respond with a form email to show they care. Those people will also tabulate the results periodically for the Senator (“802 emails saying arrest the president of Wells Fargo, 121 emails saying arrest abortion protestors, 84 emails saying arrest abortion providers, and 3 emails saying arrest women who get abortions,…”). The Senator will get the pulse of his constituents based on those reports. Very special emails may get individualized attention (“I was awarded the Congressional medal of honor, served in four overseas wars, worked on three [insert party] campaigns, and I have cancer. The VA won’t give me an oncology appointment…”)
I contacted Pat Toomey (R-PA) about refusing to vote on the nominated supreme court justice. He (or someone in his office) sent a letter in reply. I’m never voting for him, though.
I interned for a Senator in the days before email. There were people assigned to read all incoming mail and send out responses. We would give the senior staff summaries of what kind of issues people were writing about. If someone important wrote in, that would get passed on. As I recall (this was decades ago) every letter got a response of some kind. In the days of email, I’m not sure what kind of volume they get, probably a whole lot more then we got ( and we got a lot).
On the other hand, I have emailed my Senators a few times in the past few years, and always got a canned response.
Members of Congress get probably several thousand pieces of correspondence each week, so it is highly unlikely that an elected official reads any particular email or letter.
However, they may get briefings or summaries of what people are writing in about. If a thousand constituents write in about a problem with, say, rumors that the local military base is going to close, you can be reasonably assured that those letters aren’t just going to be dumped in the trash with no response. Any half-decent politician would want to have a response to that sort of thing. Another example is that if there’s a really compelling letter – let’s say a child with cancer who asks for passes to watch a Senate debate – that could very well make it to the official’s personal attention.
From what I understand, it would be pretty unusual for an elected official to simply blow off correspondence entirely, without even a cursory response. Given how many letters and emails they receive, I wouldn’t be surprised if it may take some time to respond to draft or print a response to be sent back.
But a total brush-off probably indicates one of a few things: 1) they are a terrible politician; 2) it may look like the correspondence isn’t from a real person (eg, sometimes lobbying groups print up form letters that are basically spam, and the constituents may not even know such a letter is being sent with their name); 3) maybe the letter has some pretty heavy-duty craziness in it (eg., Area 51 aliens are licking my toast) that engaging with the author is probably a mistake in any circumstances.
I’m just speculating, but the volume of emails probably outnumbers the volume of written letters by at least a hundred to one. There’s probably somebody on a Senator’s staff who goes through and checks all the emails but I bet they get a lot less attention. I’d guess that a letter, which indicates somebody was willing to spend forty-seven cents to express an opinion, carries more weight.
I don’t know about senators emails, but I sincerely hope Donald Trump is getting my tweets. I hope I’m the reason he appears so red-faced and angry much of the time.
That’s what they have staff for. Especially in the Senate where even the smallest constituency is 582k and most are measured in millions. I’ve gotten either nothing or a canned response when contacting Reps or Senators.
I did once get a personalized response…from a staffer. That was in response to request for Congressional Assistance to handle an issue with the military (You didn’t mean to resign your commission?!? Ooops!) not just voicing an opinion. Constituent services gets votes. Requests for services the office can help with aren’t in the same group as “I support/hate bill X.” If your Rep/Senator’s staff isn’t doing a good job with those emails they are shooting themselves in the foot.
I’ve sent my congressman a few e-mails and have always gotten a response from him. He even CC’ed me on the e-mails he sent regarding my concerns. Man, them state officials should did jump like cats on a hot tin roof when they got HIS e-mails. In all but one case, my problem was solved within 24 hours … The one case he just laughed; No, employers who hire illegal immigrants aren’t going to jail anytime soon.
OP: You forgot to mention one important detail: how many tens of thousands of dollars worth of contributions have you been contributing to these senators? If the answer is several you will definitely get your emails answered.
I once had an issue that I brought to my Congressman’s attention, and he looked into it, and entered into correspondence with the government agency involved, of which several of the letters back and forth were two or three pages long. He didn’t just let the agency explanation go, he continued to press them. In other words, he saw my side of the picture and went after it (or assigned a staffer to).
I always get an auto email reply thanking me for my email and that they’re not in now. When I call on the phone I am always told my message will be pass on.
I guess they have a dog sitting next to them and pass it on the dog.
Years ago on a Friday my wife and a friend sent an email to congressman about some trouble we were having with the local office of a state agency. Two days later he called me at home and after chatting a bit said that even though it was really a state matter, he’d have his staff put some pressure on them.
Ten years later and 130 miles away the now senator spoke at the high school where I was working. Afterwards I asked him if he remembered the call (he did) and introduced him to the older of the two sisters he helped us adopt.
When the Health Insurance Marketplace opened up and I got locked out of my account the first time I ended up having to go through Senator Bob Casey’s office to get tech support to reset my password. IIRC it only took about 6 weeks.
Members of Congress have little time to invest in reading constituents mail. A large part of their working day involves phone time asking for money, after which they attend daily classes on how to respond to any journalist’s question without actually revealing their thoughts.
One thing about voicing an opinion alluded to above. Politicians tend to assign a weighting to the manner in which an opinion is voiced. One which is essentially a measure of the sincerity attached to voicing to opinion, which translates to the amount of effort you make. An email doesn’t really count for a great deal. Five minutes of your time. A form email counts for almost zip. A vote on change.org close to zero. An actual letter counts a great deal more, but a photocopied form letter very little. A handwritten letter once counted more than just about anything. Nowadays they would probably frame it. One sincere personal letter is probably going to be weighted a hundred times a form email.
But never replying is very bad politics. Any politician who cares about being re-elected knows that blowing off a constituent’s email may be a vote lost that they never regain. You can’t survive in politics if you can’t count.
I get canned, phony-baloney, cover-all-bases responses from both of my senators (one from each party). I have zero faith that either one gives a knat’s ass what I write to them. But I still do it, partly to feel better, and partly to add one little tick on the grunt assistant’s checklist of constituent feedback.
I have gotten a genuine response from my house member that directly addressed my concerns - don’t know whether it was from him or a toadie, though.
And I have gotten personal responses that I know were from my state senator and representative themselves, but they have much smaller numbers of constituents and volumes of correspondence.
Not necessarily. Since the antrax scare after 9/11 postal letters have been sorted far away from the Senate and House offices. That sincere personal letter may not get delivered for weeks. If there’s ANY kind of urgency to your message, email is the way to go.